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VOL. 31, NO. 5 September/October 2022 $9.00 per issue TwoGod’sBooks 20 Arab Christianity, Science, and the Doctrine of Scripture | an interview with Wageeh Mikhail 24 Science, Religion, and Nineteenth-Century Protestantism | by James C. Ungureanu 38 Reading Genesis in the Reformation | by Wesley Viner MODERN REFORMATION THINKING THEOLOGICALLY

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Perspectives on In Quest of the Historical Adam: A Biblical and Scientific Exploration | by William Lane Craig 62 POEM | Noah’s Wife’s Lament, Genesis 6:13–18 | by Mark Green S. Horton Eric Landry | Editor Joshua Schendel | Managing Editor Patricia Anders | Poetry Editor Woiwode Anna Heitmann Editor Kate Walker | Proofreader Ann Smith | Creative Direction and Design Metaleap Creative Modern Reformation © 2022. All rights reserved. ISSN-1076-7169 | Modern Reformation (Subscriptions) 13230 Evening Creek Dr S Ste 220-222, San Diego, CA 92128 (877) 876-2026 | info@modernreformation.org | modernreformation.org | Subscription Information: US 1 YR $48. Canada add $10 per year for postage. Overseas add $9 per year for postage. Modern Reformation is a publication of Sola Media Joshua Schendel

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RETRIEVEI. 10 REFORMATION RESOURCES | “The Christian Faith” | by Herman Bavinck ; translated by Gregory Parker Jr. REFORMATION OUTTAKES | The Importance of Being Written: Scribes at the Westminster Assembly | by Zachary Purvis CONVERSEII. 20

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The intuition is basically this: The more science is able to explain, the less God is needed as an ex planation; and the less God is needed as an expla nation, the fewer reasons we have for believing

HIS IS A SPECIAL ISSUE of Modern Reformation . With it, we are wading into new waters that—to many today—may seem quite turbulent, even perilous: the relation of science to the Christian faith. As with all the issues of MR this year, we’re taking a historical approach rather than a theoretical one. In partic ular, we’re looking into the somewhat contentious and shadowed history of the relationship between Protestantism and the development of science in the Modern period. Why this topic? Why now? I think it’s fair to say that there is a general and deep sense in the Western psyche—nearly intuitive by this point— that our scientific view of the world has put the Christian religion to flight. This isn’t a recent development—with, say, the shooting star that was the New Atheists. They managed to give it a particularly public (and vitriolic) voice, no doubt. But they were merely tapping into that sense that was already deep-seated. C. S. Lewis, for example, spoke of it back in the early 1940s: It is a common reproach against Christianity that its dogmas are unchanging, while human knowledge is in continual growth. Hence, to unbelievers, we seem to be always engaged in the hopeless task of trying to force the new knowledge into moulds which it has outgrown. I think this feeling alienates the outsider much more than any particular discrepancies be tween this or that doctrine and this or that scientific theory. (Lewis, “Dogma and the Universe,” 1943)

5MODERN REFORMATION From the Editor T

Joshua Schendel Executive Editor that God exists. In other words, there seems to be some conflict between science and the Chris tian faith. Many unbelievers simply regard this sense of conflict as a truism; for many believers, it remains a nagging doubt. For both, the intuition often goes unexamined. In this issue of MR, we want to examine it. In our Converse section, James Ungureanu ex plores the rise and development of the “conflict thesis” in the nineteenth century. In the Persuade section, Wesley Viner writes about the debates in the early Modern period over the degree to which the Bible should be used as a source for our knowl edge of the natural world. The story that begins to emerge from these historical surveys is quite different from the popular telling of our day. In his Stone Lectures series delivered at Princeton University in 1898, Abraham Kuyper famously argued that “there is found hidden in Calvinism an impulse, an inclination, an incen tive, to scientific investigation.” Whether that is true only of Calvinism is subject to debate. I rather think it is a Christian impulse to know the God of creation through that creation. Although fol lowing that impulse will inevitably raise difficult questions, we may pursue them in the assurance that all truth is of God.

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JOIN THE CONVERSATION Since Modern Reformation appreciates a full theological conversation, we’d like to hear your thoughts about what you’re reading in the magazine. So please write to us at letters@modernreformation.org. Due to limited space, please keep your letter under 400 words (letters may be edited for length and clarity). Letters will be published two issues later. We look forward to hearing from you!

I REALLY ADMIRE Kendra Dahl’s work, “Re storing Eve,” in the May/June issue. It is a sol id effort, but I think it illustrates the problem of putting too much weight on philological exegesis. Maybe we should instead “read the Scriptures like the church fathers”? More time is spent on the philological arguments than is justified by the light they shed on the Scriptures. I think her con clusion, that woman’s desire is for marriage, is sound exegesis. I see this as a blessing rather than a curse! I also think an exegesis of Genesis 3:21 as emblematic of God’s gracious care for fallen hu manity would be a good addition to her analysis.

God sacrifices innocent animal life to preserve human life. Of course, this is often preached as foreshadowing the cross. I would call Genesis 3:15–19 a prophecy rather than a curse. The ser pent is cursed, but God protects and preserves his children, making the best of a bad situation. Ac tions have consequences. Genesis 3 shows us the response of a just and merciful God to unrepen tant sin. The unconditional blessing of Genesis 1:28 is affirmed. However, that blessing will be enacted in a world fallen into sin and death. In this sense, the blessing is impaired; but as Dahl points out, there is more continuity than curse. All of God’s creation is still good, including women, men, and marriage. Yet all of creation—including women, men, and marriage—is tarnished by sin. I do feel her arguments could be strengthened by an exegesis of Genesis 2:18–25. It is unwise to en gage in psychological analysis of our first parents. Leave that to Paradise Lost. However, in both Gen esis accounts, there is a strong theme of the unity of men and women before the Fall. Men and wom en are meant to be together as partners in stew ardship. Overall, I think “Restoring Eve” is a great exegetical essay and the kind of item that MR should continue to publish!

—Dan Johnson

We’d like to hear your thoughts about what you’re reading in the magazine, so please write to us at letters@ modernreformation.org. Due to limited space, keep your letter under 400 words (letters may be edited for length and clarity). We look forward to hearing from you!

7MODERN REFORMATION Letters Re: “Evangelicals & the Bible” May/June 2022

Learning from the wisdom of the past I.

9MODERN REFORMATION Vol. 31, No. 5 Retrieve

REFORMATION RESOURCES

The Christian Faith by Herman Bavinck; translated by Gregory Parker Jr. This essay was originally published in Dutch as a three-part series in De Vrije Kerk in 1883. 1 That same year, Bavinck was installed as a professor at the Theologische School in Kampen. What follows is an excerpt from the English translation, which may be found in its entirety in What Is Christianity? (Hendrickson, 2022). In this portion of the essay, Bavinck explores the content of faith through a short exposition of the Apostles’ Creed. At the end of Bavinck’s life, his brother Coenraad included the essay in a curated volume of Bavinck’s most important theological writings.2

10 September/October 2022

HOW THIS FAITH is worked in our hearts cannot be fully described. The work ing of the Spirit is so wonderful, so unfathomable, and nearly impossible to put into words. We are confronted here with a miracle and with a mystery. This I know: it is not attained by historical-critical research and theoretical studies. Nor by a favorable predisposition or a solid character. It is worked into us by a powerful, immediate impression, at the very moment when the reality of spiri tual things powerfully and irresistibly thrusts itself upon our souls and proclaims itself as truth. Suddenly, a light then dawns on us that shows us the misery of “below” and the holiness and glory of “above.” We have a weak analogy with this indescribable impression in the way in which the moral law powerfully announces itself as a real power in the con science of every human being. There is also an analogy in the strange phenom enon that the most wonderful thoughts suddenly fall into our consciousness and are perceived as a gift. Thus with Athanasius, the firm conviction of the divinity of the Son and with Augustine, the certainty of election was awakened by an immediate impression ( onmiddellijken indruk ); and with Luther, justifi cation by faith alone was unshakably established. No article of our confession rests on intellectual research or scientific investigation; these always came af ter. What gave a dogma subjective assurance and its confessors strength and courage of conviction was always that immediate (onmiddellijken), indescribable impression ( onbeschrijflijke indruk ) of its truth in the heart through the Spirit. Only then is our faith true when it becomes impossible for us to believe oth erwise: that “I cannot do other than; I must not do other than,” that gives our faith the power to overcome the world, that makes every article of our faith the product of a deep spiritual experience, a spiritual gain, by reverently accepting, What Christianity?is by Herman Bavinck; translated by Gregory Parker Jr.

11MODERN REFORMATION Retrieve if we ourselves may find the truth of it so powerfully expressed in our hearts. However, this impression (onmiddellijk) is not created in us so immediately that the Holy Spirit would exclude any possible means. As in the natural world, conviction in the spiritual realm is also “mediated” (vermittelt) by the Word. Only the Word can awaken this conviction in us. The Holy Spirit must be spoken into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, in such a tone and with such emphasis as he alone, who brought forth the Word, is able to do and then it leaves an indelible impres sion (onuitwischbaren indruk) in our souls. Then the truth of it is unquestionably sealed in our hearts. This faith, then, is something so tender and holy that it can rest only in God—in no one else, in no book or writing—only and exclusively in God. But then still in God, who speaks to me in his written word and confirms the truth of it to my heart by his Holy Spirit. God, his word, his promises, his deeds are the pillars on which my faith rests. It is facts, deeds, and history that form its foundation, and whose inseparable connection with the truth sealed in us guarantees its future. Therefore, if you will, we believe in authority, in the au thority of God himself, who works in us by his Spirit a joyful faith in him and his word. And so little is that authority a compulsion or force, that faith itself knows no greater joy than to rest in that authority of God. Yes, it would die and wither if it rested in anything else but God. For it is firm and certain, not because it is faith but because its faith is in God; it is strong and the conqueror of the world, because its faith in Christ overcomes the world; it is holy and glorious, because its faith is in the Holy Spirit.

Standing in that faith, living through [that faith], the church also expresses what it believes. [The church] neither hides nor is ashamed of its confession. Assured and full of confidence, [the church] speaks it joyfully, even though the funeral pyres are smoking. Yes, in the glow of martyrdom, its confession was often the most powerful; what was experienced in the soul automatically forced itself upon its lips. [The church] confessed and could not confess otherwise. That is the impulse of its heart; [the church] cannot remain silent; it believes and therefore it speaks. [The church] must testify of God’s miracles, mention his majestic deeds. Is the Holy Scripture not enough for it? Oh, most certainly, this is its only source; from [the Scripture] everything flows to [the church], in its depths [the church] dives again and again. Scripture is the magnificent painting which, in a series of captivating scenes, brings before our eyes the works of God in salvation history. Well then, that powerful imprint which the Scriptures make on [the church], it must reproduce. What [the church] has seen through that wonderful book, what it has felt of the word of life, it must proclaim. [The church] must try to put it into words and account for it. [The church] has absorbed what the Scriptures tell it, lived it as it were, and now reproduces it in its confession. Emerging again from the penetration of the Holy Scriptures, it looks around itself, feels strange in this world, and expresses to opponents and those who are astray—with holy enthusiasm—what it has experienced and enjoyed. [The church] does not create; it does not discover a single truth; it only finds what is laid down in Scripture; it merely reflects after the Holy Spirit has thought it all out, but then [the church]

“The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed . . . “ (Matt. 13:31) expresses what it has found and thus reflects in its own language, in its own way, fully conscious, and understandable for everyone. The confession it expresses, therefore, does not stand above or beside or outside Scripture, but entirely in Scripture. From this [the confession] is wrought, through the channel of con gregationalNaturally,experience.thatdidnot happen all at once; what is contained in that Bible is so rich and so broad in scope that it cannot be taken in and reproduced by one person, not by a single generation of people. That requires centuries. The knowl edge of the length and breadth and depth and height of Christ’s love can only be attained in fellowship with all the saints. First, therefore, the confession is small. Nothing else is needed except: I believe in Jesus, the Christ. Later on, it will be explained more broadly in the words: I believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. That is the root, which later on grows into the trunk of the twelve articles of faith. And each time the church is introduced more deeply into God’s revelation in subsequent times, this root grows up and various branches grow on it, some of which bend sideways and grow in the wrong direction. But thus, in the course of the centuries, the love of Christ is interpreted more and more broadly, and that glorious image which the church conceives from the Holy Scriptures and causes to radiate outwardly is further and further completed.

It is hard to say what [the church] is already professing because it is so rich and so deep. [The church] believes in God. It thinks about him, it meditates upon him, it testifies about him. Of God always, of God alone. Of the deeds that he has wrought from ancient times, which he continues to work until the end of the centuries. [The church] lives from God, it rests in him, it speaks of him, of his being and attributes, of his works and wonders, of him in the entire riches of his self-revelation, in the unsearchable fullness of his beings, in the Trinity of his existence. In his works, it sees three circles, in his existence three ways, never separated, always distinguished, reflecting itself also in its own spiritual experience. The inexhaustible riches of the divine life and being manifest itself in his self-revelation, which is expressed and represented by the church in its con fession of the trinitarian God. First of all, the church, beautifully distinguished from the world, feels absolutely dependent on an absolute power, which called [the church] and all things out and still maintains and rules over them. For [the church], however, this power is not an impersonal fate, not a subdued thought, but a divine independence who knows and wants, rules and directs it, which [the church] addresses as “Thou” and to whom it voluntarily and unconditionally bows. [The church] confesses him as the Creator of heaven and earth, who in the divine being exists as one in himself, from whom all things derive their origin, the sovereign, the lawgiver, the judge of all things. Nonetheless, it also confesses him as the Father, Father of the Son, and through [the Son], Father also of his children on earth, whom he cares for and guards as the apple of his eye. All these things that are part of Scriptures, and that they themselves experience in the soul, lift up the eye thankfully to heaven and confess I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth.

12 September/October 2022

But [the church] confesses even more. Yes, if it had no more to confess, it would be unable to confess even this little with reason alone. The world honors neither the Creator nor the Father except in name alone. But the church believes in the Father because it also believes in the Son. And here, the church is now at the heart of its confession. Jesus Christ is the center of all its knowledge and faith. [The church] wants nothing but to know of him, the crucified one. Think of him, consider him, describe him; of his eternal generation from the Father to his conception and birth from Mary; and from there, it follows him throughout his life into his death and burial; and when he rose and ascended to heaven, then [the church] looks after him, keeping an eye above where Christ is, believing that in time he will return upon the clouds of heaven. Through him, [the church] rejoices; a complete reversal has been brought about. [Christ] has restored the relationship of all things to God, which had been disturbed by sin. He has reconciled all things to God, including mankind.

13MODERN REFORMATION Retrieve

“But the church believes in the Father because it also believes in the Son. And here, the church is now at the heart of its confession. Jesus Christ is the center of all its knowledge and faith.”

Heaven and earth, God and man, Jew and Gentile, Greek and Barbarian—all are reconciled. He brought about that powerful reversal, not by force of arms but only by suffering. His entire life is summarized by the church in the word: he who suffered. Through the cross alone, he has triumphed over the principalities and powers. That was his only weapon. Alone and never in anything other than in the sign of the cross, he has achieved victory. That is the point: all things are reconciled and reunified. Just as everything turned away from God through the tree of knowledge, so everything returns to God through the cross. After having accomplished reconciliation, he now proceeds to gather all things under him as the head in the fullness of time—everything that is in heaven and on earth [Eph. 1:10]. As king he will reign until all his enemies are laid under his feet. Consider ing all this now, the church once again raises its eye with vivacity and declares, I believe in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord. But even more is included in this confession of faith. The reconciliation is there. But then the questions arise: How am I going to stand in it, how do I par ticipate in it, when the unholy powers of sin inside and outside of me carry me farther and farther from Christ? What is the divine power that disengages me from my unholy self and brings me into fellowship with Christ? What power drives us to Christ and to his cross? The church has the answer ready. There is another one: a guide in truth, a comforter who, proceeding from God, returns to Christ and thus returns to the Father, who is not of this world though [he] works in it, and who rebirths and renews us. And the church, looking up the third time, confesses: I believe in the Holy Spirit. Threefold is he, the true living God whom the church worships. He is three fold in existence, one in essence. For if [the church] did not know that the Father was God, it could not rely on him. If it did not know that the Son was God, it could not rest on his satisfaction for time and eternity. If [the church] did not know that the Holy Spirit was God, it could not rely on his testimony and could not entrust herself to his guidance. [If we] take away just one of these three ways, [then] salvation will falter in our souls and the assurance of faith is impossible.

1. Herman Bavinck, De Vrije Kerk 9:1, 2, 4 (January, February, April 1883): 44–47, 90–95, 184–93.

But since God is above, before, and in us, and we are surrounded, cared for, pre served by God on all sides, we may even now have rest and peace, for salvation is certain. If God is for us, then who will be against us [Rom. 8:31]? From him and through him and unto him are all things; to him be the glory [Rom. 11:36].

2. Herman Bavinck, “Het Christelijk Geloof,” Kennis en leven: opstellen en artikelen uit vroegere jaren, verzameld door Ds C. B. Bavinck (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1922), 86–97.

But who will honor him? Once more the church raises its voice and declares, I believe in one holy catholic Christian church. [The church] is there and it will be com pleted despite the attacks and the gates of hell. Through the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the flesh, [the church] will certainly be restored to eternal life. There is no doubt about it. This is where all the works of the three divine persons are directed. One in essence, they are also one in purpose. [The church] is the temple they build together and desire for dwelling. And when the elements burn and the earth and its works perish, then this temple, on which God has la bored for centuries, will arise gloriously upon the ruins of sin and abide forever.

14 September/October 2022

Gregory Parker Jr is a PhD candidate in systematic theology at the University of Edinburgh. He is the co-editor and co-translator with Cameron Clausing of Herman Bavinck’s The Sacrifice of Praise (Hen drickson, 2019) and Guidebook for Instruction in the Christian Religion (Hendrickson, 2022). He is also the editor and translator of Bavinck’s What Is Christianity? (Hendrickson, 2022) and an assistant professor of theology at Cairn University.

The Importance of Being Written: Scribes at the Westminster Assembly by Zachary Purvis

15MODERN REFORMATION Retrieve

REFORMATION OUTTAKES

Take notes they did. There are rough minutes of assembly proceedings in early modern shorthand, revised minutes in a more polished hand, and registers

Adoniram AssemblyWestminster(1602–1660)Byfieldscribe

SPECTERS HAUNT THE HISTORY of church committees. Today’s disciplined clerks, as we know them, harken back to yesterday’s unseen scribes. Every reader of ecclesiastical documents and every lover of polity, decency, and good order remains in their debt. For without them, there would be no surviving record of church business. No committee—therefore no associated team of clerks or scribes—is more important for post-Reformation theology, piety, and practice in the English-speaking world than the Westminster Assembly, which met from July 1643 to April 1653. True, the assembly was not a church committee, but a political one. In the midst of an English civil war that was part of a wider war of the three kingdoms—England, Scotland, and Ireland, all ruled by Charles I—England’s Long Parliament set up in London an advisory body of ministers, divines , to reform the church. The advisory body had to admit members of Parliament (MPs) from both the House of Commons and the House of Lords to sit in on plenary sessions. But Protestants remember the assembly primar ily for the documents it produced known as the Westminster Standards: the Confession of Faith, the Shorter Catechism, the Larger Catechism, and the Directory for Public Worship. Indeed, Presbyterians the world over still re ceive and subscribe (write their name beneath, both literally and figuratively) to these confessional and catechetical statements as legal and constitutional, as constitutive of the public official teaching and governing of the church.

By the end of the assembly’s first day on July 1, 1643, the need to record care fully all that would be said and done was obvious. On the second day, Parliament appointed two scribes “to set down all proceedings”: Adoniram Byfield and Hen ry Robrough.1 Though divines themselves and indispensable pieces of the West minster puzzle, these two men were not, properly speaking, voting members. This fact was made all too clear to them in the debate as to whether they should be permitted to sit with their hats on in the assembly, as did other members. To forbid scribes to wear hats would make them easily identifiable but would also be insulting to them. More important, hats would help keep them warm—and comfortable, behatted scribes might take better notes.2

Of course, these scribes were not the only divines to jot down what happened inside Westminster Abbey and its famed Jerusalem Chamber, where commit tee work took place. The churchman John Lightfoot, one of England’s learned Talmudic scholars alongside John Selden, who was also at the assembly, kept an elegant journal into which he entered summaries of the assembly’s opening months.7 Robert Baillie ignored rules about confidentiality by sending dispatches of assembly proceedings across Scotland and Europe.8 George Gillespie also took copious notes, sometimes relocating the order of speeches in his narrative, and he seems to have enjoyed doing so, writing home to Scotland to say that London was the best place on earth.9

16 September/October 2022 of votes and decisions—550,000 words in all. More than one historian has sighed in agony over Byfield’s penmanship: “hurried and abbreviated in style”; “an exe crable seventeenth-century hand in extraordinary abstruseness and complexity”; a rough scrawl made worse by incomplete sentences, erasures, and insertions. 3

Occasionally, Byfield’s personality peeks out from the textual mass, but it is difficult to observe and fleeting—like sunshine against the London fog. When Anthony Tuck ney, master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, complained that Parliament could be as harsh in rule as the king had been, Byfield put down his pen but indicated that the speech continued— the rest was better left unrecorded.4 He found a speech on Matthew 18 by Philip Nye, the lead ing Congregationalist at the assembly and one of its most called-to-order speakers, to be “little to the purpose.”5 He amused himself by writing the name of Paul Best, who was jailed for denying the Trinity at the Gatehouse Prison in front of Westminster Abbey’s Great West Door, as “Paul Beast.”6 Nevertheless, Byfield and his coworkers are mostly invisible in the documentary evidence; they are record-keepers, not record-makers.

Assertion of Liberty of Conscience by the Independents of the AssemblyWestminsterofDivines

by John Rogers

proceedings.keptRobertdown,”immediatelydoms.”statespernicious,wasPresbyteriansadvocatedchurchthatPhilipInHerbertthispainting,Nyearguestheformofgovernmentbythe“thriceovertocivilandkingHewas“cryedaccordingtoBaillie,whoajournalofthe

The minutes produced by the scribes offer a fuller, stranger, more remarkable account: snapshots of impassioned debates, piercing examinations, heartfelt resolutions—hours of nettlesome discussion over many days are often condensed into a few fragmentary lines. The pace of the assembly, and the toil of the scribes, was exhausting. Stephen Marshall, the most frequent preacher before Parliament and the most frequent speaker at the assembly, commented: “All our discours es are recorded by the scribes so far as their pens can reach them.” 10 Rarely, the scribes miscounted the vote; when they did, it caused, in Lightfoot’s words, “a great deal of heat.” 11 Twice Cornelius Burges, one of the most important mem bers of the assembly, required the scribes to “improve” his sensitive speeches. 12 For their immense labors, the scribes received the same pay as the other divines, although sometimes they were able to supplement their meager stipends. In 1645, for example, when the Directory for Public Worship went to print, under

13. Journals of the House of Commons 4:10–11 (Jan. 4, 1645).

5. MPWA 2:351 (Oct. 1, 1644; Session 294). 6. MPWA 2:642 (Aug. 5, 1645; Session 480); 2:663 (Sept. 11, 1645; Session 501); 2:665 (Sept. 15, 1645; Session 503).

7. Lightfoot, Journal; MPWA 1:61.

Byfield’s supervision, the proceeds were split equally among the scribes and the two parliamentary houses.13 These minutes provide more than mere antiquarian interest. Not only do they reveal how the assembly worked, but also—and most importantly for the church, then as now—they illuminate what the divines meant when discussing points of profound doctrinal import: the obedience of Christ, the eternal de cree, the nature of Christian liberty and liberty of conscience, among others. John Bower’s verdict is apt: It is chiefly through the assembly’s minutes and papers, aided by other sources such as Parliament’s journals and a steady stream of contemporary published works, where the assembly’s day-to-day work to create order amid civil war and ecclesias tical chaos is to be found. It is here where the history of the confession’s text unfolds.14

17MODERN REFORMATION Retrieve

3. C. A. Briggs, “The Documentary History of the Westminster Assembly,” The Presbyterian Review 1 (1880): 130; Robert S. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord: Politics and Religion in the Westminster Assembly and the “Grand Debate” (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1985), 73. 4. MPWA 2:287 (Sept. 9, 1644; Session 281).

Zachary Purvis (DPhil, University of Oxford) is lecturer of church history at Edinburgh Theological Seminary.

8. Robert Baillie, The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, ed. David Laing, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Robert Ogle, 1841), 108; Chad Van Dixhoorn, “Scottish Influence on the Westminster Assembly: A Study of the League’s Summoning Ordinance and the Solemn League and Covenant,” Scottish Church History 37 (2007): 58. 9. George Gillespie to Robert Murray, May 21, 1645, in Baillie, Letters, 507. 10. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord, 562 (spelling modernized).

11. MPWA 1:57 (spelling modernized).

12. MPWA 2:80 (Sept. 8, 1643; Session 49); 2:128 (Sept. 15, 1643; Session 56).

14. John R. Bower, The Confession of Faith: A Critical Text and Introduction (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage, 2020), 51. 15. See note 2.

In antiquity, unheralded scribes copied out the Scriptures; from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, long-forgotten copyists made possible great books by scholars that are still read today. Likewise, the scribes at the Westminster Assem bly left behind a long and winding trail of paper, as challenging as it is rewarding to follow. We have an ideal guide to their world: the sublime five-volume edition of the Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly ( MPWA) by Chad Van Dix hoorn.15 When we read through it, we can become better readers of the church’s confession. For that reason, we might even fill our ministers’ libraries with the MPWA, to make available scholarly tools for pastoral reflection and study—a motion, perhaps, for the next committee.

1. John Lightfoot, Journal of the Proceedings of the Assembly of Divines, ed. John Rogers Pitman (London: J. F. Dove, 1824), 3–4. 2. The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652, ed. Chad Van Dixhoorn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 2:281 (Nov. 7, 1643; Session 90) (hereafter MPWA).

Discussing from perspectives of the present

ConverseII.

19MODERN REFORMATION Vol. 31, No. 5

Dr. Mikhail, please tell us a little bit about yourself, your academic inter ests, and what you are currently working on.

The theological issues discussed in the Western world are not necessarily of significance to the church in the Muslim world, because Islam raises different

I studied theology at the Cairo Evangelical Theological Seminary, Westmin ster Theological Seminary, and at Calvin Seminary. I received my PhD from the University of Birmingham in the UK. My passion is to see the gospel reconciled to the Arab culture. That is why I focused throughout my studies on Arab Christian literature written in the Middle Ages. Arabic-speaking Christians in the Middle Ages left behind invaluable literature in which they responded to the intellectu al questions Muslim polemicists offered against Christianity. This was the first Christian response to Islam in history. Arab Christians offered logical, pastoral, and biblical answers in reverence and respect. Not only did they offer a reason for the hope within, but they also played an indispensable role in building the Arab/ Islamic civilization under the Abbasid Dynasty, pioneering the translation move ment from Greek and Syriac into Arabic. My passion is to highlight their answers, role, and theology, for I am convinced that the church in the Arab world exists to day because of their faithfulness and testimony for which they paid a costly price. I currently serve with ScholarLeaders International, whose mission is to “encourage and enable Christian theological leaders from the Majority World—Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East—for the Global Church.” I lead several projects related to Christianity and Islam. In recent centuries in the West, much thinking about the doctrine and reliability of Scripture has centered around science. How reliable is the Bible, given the discoveries of modern science? How would you characterize the key issues related to the doctrine of Scripture for Arab Christianity, both historically and more recently?

GLOBAL THEOLOGICAL FORUM Arab Christianity, Science, and the Doctrine of Scripture an interview with Wageeh Mikhail

20 September/October 2022 Rev. Wageeh Mikhail (PhD) is the engagement director of ScholarLeaders International (ScholarLeaders.org). Prior to this role, Dr. Mikhail served as director of the Center for Middle Eastern Christianity at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo, Egypt. He has published and spoken widely on medieval Arab Christianity.

21MODERN REFORMATION Converse questions than those raised by atheism or secularism. The sociopolitical challeng es that millions of Christians face in the Muslim world leave them puzzled at the issues discussed in the West. Surely, this is not to dismiss some theological issues discussed in the West. But it is to assert that different contexts demand different answers to different questions. So, for example, Christians in the Muslim world are not so much concerned with science and Scripture, because in a Muslim con text the first thing that comes to mind regarding the Bible is the allegation of corruption (Taḥrīf). Muslim polemicists, as early as the eighth century, have been accusing the Jews and the Christians of altering the Scripture. This allegation has some Qur’anic basis (see 2:24; 3:71, 78, 187, 6:91, 7:162).

Another example concerns the Paraclete (παράκλητος), the comforter prom ised in John 14:16–17. Muslim polemicists have taken this as a reference to Mu hammad and argue that this word has been intentionally changed from periklytos (the praised one; i.e., “Ahmad” in Arabic, the name of Prophet Muhammad) to paraklytos (the comforter; i.e., the Holy Spirit). This argument has been proven to be absurd on a logical and a linguistic basis. The pioneer theologian who refuted this allegation was Patriarch Timothy I (AD 728–823), patriarch of the Church of the East, in his dialogue with the Abbasid Caliph al-Mahdi (AD 745–785). In a two-day meeting with the patriarch, the caliph raises many issues and objections against Christianity. Timothy answers creatively and gently, and he decisively refutes all allegations against Christianity, one of which was the Paraclete argu ment. Timothy clearly answers: If Muhammad were the Paraclete, since the Paraclete is the Spirit of God, Mu hammad would, therefore, be the Spirit of God; and the Spirit of God being uncir cumscribed like God, Muhammad would also be uncircumscribed like God; and Codex Arabicus (Mt. Sinai, Egypt)

Let us consider the example of ‘Ammār al-Baṣrī (a ninth-century Arab Chris tian theologian), who in refuting this allegation imagines a conversation or debate with a Muslim thinker who brings forth this allegation. ‘Ammār begins with the presupposition that the Christian religion has been established through won drous miracles. There had been no earthly incentive or use of swords. Rather, those who had embraced Christianity had done so by divine compulsion through signs. It followed, then, that the written gospel that had been instrumental in the spread of Christianity was also confirmed on the basis of the same compulsion. This necessitated that the gospel be true and that full trust be given to its con tent. ‘Ammār agrees with his interlocutor that there are various interpretations of the Christian Scriptures, but he notes that this does not mean that the text has been altered. Rather, the very existence of different interpretations is a strong argument against those who accuse the Scriptures of having been corrupted. For if they had been corrupted, ‘Ammār argues, then it would be natural to expect all interpretations to agree. According to ‘Ammār, even the accusation of falsifi cation is not legitimate. He bases his case on the fact that Christianity was con firmed by divine signs and not by earthly incentives. This strategy was common in Arab Christian apologetics during the ‘Abbasid caliphate.

Overlying text in Arabic (ca. 900)

he who is uncircumscribed being invisible, Muhammad would also be invisible and without a human body; and he who is without a body being uncomposed, Muham mad would also be uncomposed. Indeed, he who is a spirit has no body, and he who has no body is also invisible, and he who is invisible is also uncircumscribed; but he who is circumscribed is not the Spirit of God, and he who is not the Spirit of God is not the Paraclete. It follows from all this that Muhammad is not the Paraclete.

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The Paraclete is from heaven and of the nature of the Father, and Muhammad is from the earth and of the nature of Adam. Since heaven is not the same thing as earth, nor is God the Father identical with Adam, the Paraclete is not, therefore, Muhammad. (Mingana, Timothy I)

What can the global church learn from Arab Christianity, particularly in re gard to the doctrine of Scripture? The church in the Arab world has a wealth of knowledge awaiting to be shared with the global church, especially regarding answering questions raised solely by Muslims. Not only does the church in the Arab world have fourteen hun dred years of answers to Islamic objections on the credibility of the Bible, but the church in the Arab world has also been specially blessed by having numerous Bible translations that go back to as early as the eighth century. The Arabic Bible has been penetrating the Arab culture due to the incredible work of Arab Chris tians who worked hard to bring the word of God in the new lingua franca, and in a culture dominated by accusations against the Christian Scripture. Ibn al-ʿAssāl, a Coptic thinker and translator from the thirteenth century, provided a wonderful scholarly Arabic translation of the Gospels. He even created his own textual appa ratus symbols, centuries before Western theologians introduced textual criticism!

In Arabic, there is no single word for “Bible.” Instead, we say “al-Kitāb al-Muqaddas.” This literally reads as “the Holy Book.” The Scriptures in the Arab context have been under attack since the eighth century, and for this exact reason, al-Kitāb al-Muqaddas is so precious. It has been established in the Arab culture because of those who stood firm facing many challenges, and in doing so they paid the ultimate price: their blood. Because of this state of affairs, al-Kitāb al-Muqaddas is not to be taken lightly. It is the word of God that made its way to our culture as early as the Day of the Pentecost (Acts 2: 11).

Yet, it remains that the best gift with which the Arab church has been blessed is the fact that her culture is the same as the Bible. Biblical figures of speeches, parables, and idioms are easily understood by the average Arabic-speaking Chris tian because they share the same culture. The Bible is a divine text inspired in a Middle Eastern context, part of which is the Arabic-speaking community. The late Professor Kenneth E. Baily, who wrote repeatedly on this point, provides an insider Arabic perspective on the parables of Christ.

by Jon Young Some want a god who whispers, or maybe roars. You give us a God who groans. And what is it that generates such glory-craving, guttural moans? We are not ready for this: Our own aches lodged deeper than our bones. Desires behind Sodesires.thecreation itself wails, waiting for some Edenic arrival of a happily ever after. But the One who levitated over apparently eternal waters grits his proverbial teeth over the pains of another universe, groaning over the disjointed galaxies we call our souls. Is this what you contend? So be it then.

Talking Prayer with the Apostle Paul

23MODERN REFORMATION Converse POEM

RELIGION,SCIENCE, AND NINETEENTHCENTURY Protestantism by JAMES UNGUREANUC. 24

25MODERN REFORMATION Converse W

HEN SCHOLARS WRITE about the “conflict thesis,” what exactly are they talking about? For several decades now, scholars have tried to make sense of the belief that science and religion are at war. This is what scholars mean when they refer to the “conflict thesis,” the idea that science and religion are fundamentally and irrevocably at “war” or in “conflict.” The conflict thesis has been used by many as a metanarrative, an overarching view that encompasses the entire course of Western civilization. It attempts to explain how the modern secular person came to be. Historians typically trace the origins of this thesis to the late nineteenth century, specifically among Anglo-American writers. For instance, many schol ars point to the scientific naturalists, a Victorian coterie made up of biologist Thomas H. Huxley (1828–1895), physicist John Tyndall (1820–1893), and evo lutionary philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), among others, who sup posedly employed the thesis in their attempt to professionalize and secularize the sciences. More precisely still, most scholars see New York University chemist John William Draper (1811–1882) and historian and first president of Cornell University Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) as cofounders of a philosophy of history that has promulgated the belief that science and religion have been, and always will be, at odds. There is a great deal of truth here. Indeed, Huxley once declared that “ex tinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules.” He believed that history demonstrated that “whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain.” The historical record proved, he asserted, that as natural knowl edge increased, belief in the supernatural decreased. According to Huxley, no one should “imagine he is, or can be, both a true son of the Church and a loyal soldier of science.” 1

Similarly, Draper, who published a book in 1874 titled History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, claimed that the history of science was “a narrative of conflict of two contending powers.” He believed that faith in its nature is “un changeable, stationary,” whereas science is “progressive.” White, who published the massive, two-volume History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Chris tendom in 1896, also spoke of the “battle-fields of science,” contending that his tory reveals the “great sacred struggle for the liberty of science.” But historical movements can rarely be explained in such simplistic terms. In the last few de cades especially, historians have scrutinized the narratives of Draper and White and found them completely wanting. They have rightly debunked many of the “myths” about science and religion.2

The nineteenth century witnessed a marked development in human understand ing, learning, and modern scientific investigation. But it was also the century where Christianity was put under severe duress. Advances in the natural and his torical sciences, intentional or not, seemed to many a direct assault on traditional Christian belief. Debates about the character of religion raged both within and without the church, and out of these debates emerged new ways of thinking about the nature of Christian faith, the historical existence of Jesus, the character and authority of Scripture, the nature of the church, and the future of religion. It was a time of much doubt and disillusionment. As scholar of religion Linda Wood head put it, the nineteenth century witnessed the “reinvention” of Christianity.3

If religion would only rid itself of dogmatism and ecclesiastical authority, then science and religion would be in harmony. The distinction between and separa

The Emerging “New Religion” of the Nineteenth Century

What this new or freer religion looked like was, of course, deeply contested. But however it was conceived, many men and women in the nineteenth century believed that the reconciliation of science and religion depended on it. Signifi cantly, one key strategy used by liberal Protestants and dissident intellectuals at the end of the century was turning “theology” into a pejorative. By contrasting the idea of a free, progressive scientific inquiry against the authoritative, reac tionary methods of theology, religious liberals imagined dogma as an obstacle of modern thought, not faith. Thus “conflict” occurred, they believed, not between scientific truth and religious truth, but between contesting theological traditions.

To a certain extent, however, these historians of science themselves are guilty of “mythologization.” While it is true that there are many “myths” about the con flict between religion and science, the idea that the nineteenth century witnessed the inception of the “conflict thesis” is not entirely accurate either. What is more, we are only now beginning to recognize that many of the accused did not, in fact, envision a conflict between science and religion at all. What is often missed in their discussions of Draper and White is an appreciation of the wider religious context in which such historical narratives first appeared.

26 September/October 2022

***

This new “reinvented” Christianity was part and parcel of nineteenthcentury liberal Protestantism. Recognizing that advances in the sciences and his torical criticism had supposedly contradicted established religious ideas, many attempted to ameliorate the emerging malaise by readjusting or reconstructing the meaning of religion; that is, nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism gen erally responded to higher criticism and scientific naturalism by transforming rather than abandoning the faith. By the last decades of the century, the “New Theology” or “new religion” movement had found numerous supporters on both sides of the Atlantic.4

27MODERN REFORMATION tion of religion and theology was thus extremely important; indeed, the future of religion depended on it. Many liberal Protestants believed that the separation of religion from theology was the best approach to bridging the growing schism between modern thought and ancient faith, and thus for bringing about recon ciliation between science and religion. ***

The Need for a More “Reasonable” Faith

“Many liberal Prot estants believed that the separation of religion from theology was the best approach to bridging the grow ing schism between modern thought and ancient faith.”

Converse

The separation of religion from theology of course antedates the late nineteenth century. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, theologians and natural philosophers attempted to establish a more “rational” foundation for Christian belief. These Protestants promoted a “reasonable” creed against the superstition and irrationality of Puritan enthusiasts and Catholics alike. Recourse to “reason” had become a litmus test. Knowledge of the natural and the supernat ural came from the use of reason; and for a growing group of intellectuals, reason and religion developed a holy alliance. This attitude toward reason and religion reached its high-water mark in the teaching and writings of the so-called Cam bridge Platonists, a loose-knit group of divines that included men like Benjamin Whichcote (1609–1683), Henry More (1614–1687), Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688), John Smith (1618–1652), Nathaniel Culverwell (1619–1651), and others. Whatever their differences, this band of Cambridge men pursued the refor mation of religion along more rationalistic lines. In prose, sermons, and poems, they declared that external forms were unimportant and that religion should be pared down to the essentials. They therefore underplayed dogmatism and op posed superstition, enthusiasm, and fanaticism. Concomitantly, they also placed more emphasis on the inner spiritual light than on outward rules of worship and propositional beliefs. The rational theologies of the Cambridge Platonists put an emphasis on the relationship between core religious doctrines, natural law, and a personal divine providence, with evidence for this intrinsic relationship to be found in the ideas already present in the mind, in the natural world, in the associated records or observations of the experimental philosophers, and in his tory. “Religion” for the Cambridge Platonists referred to primarily a “rational Christianity” of some kind, particularly a rational Protestantism.5 The ideas expressed in the writings of the Cambridge Platonists formed a vital link to subsequent developments in English thought. Numerous scholars have noted the close association between the Cambridge Platonists and English Latitudinarian divines, who similarly sought to minimize doctrinal discord by emphasizing human reason in understanding revelation. Indeed, the tendencies of the Cambridge Platonists found fuller expression in the rational theology of the Latitudinarians, which included such men as William Chillingworth (1602–1644), John Wilkins (1614–1672), Simon Patrick (1626–1707), Isaac Barrow

Thus when the English deists first appeared, they had an abundant selection of Protestant rhetorical strategies and natural theologies that supported their critique of orthodox Christianity. With a more diffusive Christianity emerging, men—such as Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), Charles Blount (1654–1693), Matthew Tindal (1656–1733), Thomas Woolston (1669–1733), John Toland (1670–1722), Anthony Collins (1679–1729), Thomas Morgan (d. 1743), Thomas Chubb (1679–1747), Conyers Middleton (1683–1750), and Peter Annet (1693–1769)—promoted a noninstitutional and therefore nonpartisan and nondogmatic “natural religion.” These deists consistently condemned re vealed religion in general and Christianity in particular.

With the exception of Henry More, all of the atPlatonistscenturyseventeenth-CambridgestudiedEmmanuelCollege.

But the English deists were neither atheists nor even deists in an exclusive or fi nal sense. Most of them in fact denied the sobriquet! The English deists

Rather than limiting the true faith to those fundamental doctrines shared by all Christians, the English deists simply broadened the perspective and located “true faith” in the “religion of nature”—that is, in those basic rational beliefs supposedly shared by all men in all ages.

28 September/October 2022 (1630–1677), John Tillotson (1630–1694), Ed ward Stillingfleet (1635–1699), Joseph Glanvill (1636–1680), and Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715), among others.6

The Latitudinarians considered their ra tional theology both a defense against atheism and a deliberate attempt at integrating the new science with traditional religious thought. The increasing “mechanization” of nature during the eighteenth century provided new visions of God and, concomitantly, new “physico-theological” treatises. Writers such as Walter Charleton (1619–1707), Robert Boyle (1627–1691), John Ray (1627–1705), Isaac Barrow (1630–1677), Christopher Wren (1632–1723), Robert Hooke (1635–1703), Richard Bentley (1642–1726), Isaac Newton (1642–1727), Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), William Whiston (1667–1752), William Derham (1657–1735), and many others believed the new natural philosophy could be used in defense of Christianity. However, as with the Cambridge Platonists and the Latitudinarians, these “English virtuosi” sought to demonstrate not only how God has revealed himself in nature, but also how a more “rational” Protestantism provided an at mosphere more conducive to the sciences.7

It is important to point out that the emphasis on reason and nature shifted the focus of religion away from sin, grace, and redemption. Reason and na ture thus came to overshadow revelation in many respects. But the rational theology of the Cambridge Platonists, Latitudinarian divines, and English physico-theologians would eventually come to undermine the very reason ableness of orthodox Christianity itself. Indeed, English rational theology of the seventeenth century laid the foundations for the deistic critique of reve lation in the eighteenth century, as philosopher Charles Taylor has observed. 8

Converse

29MODERN REFORMATION did, of course, reject the Athanasian Creed and denied the divinity of Christ. They reduced religion to what they regarded as its most foundational, rationally justifiable elements. But so did many Protestant thinkers. What is clear, then, is that these men had taken the views of the Cambridge Platonists, Latitudinarians, and English natural theologians to their logical conclusions. They extended the Protestant historical and rational critique against Catholicism to Anglicanism and argued that all hierarchical established churches should be replaced with a noninstitutional “natural religion.” *** A New “Science” and New “Religion” at the Turn of the Century

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the English tradition of physicotheology culminated in Archdeacon William Paley’s (1743–1805) trilogy, Prin ciples of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), A View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794), and Natural Theology; Or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802). Paley believed these works con tained “the evidences of Natural Religion, the evidences of Revealed Religion, and an account of the duties that result from both.” 9 Thus, like the “rational theologians” before him, Paley argued that contrivance proves design. And like his predecessors, Paley’s religious views inclined toward liberalism. Indeed, one may read his natural theology as Paley’s efforts to reconcile liberal Christianity with divine providence.10 In the 1830s, philosophers and scientists were just beginning to try to define what exactly “science” is. In their definitions, the authors relied on existing pro gressive historical narratives. The astronomer and mathematician John F. W. Herschel (1792–1871), the uniformitarian geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875), and the philosopher and historian of science William Whewell (1794–1866) are prime examples. Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830) was highly regarded by friends and colleagues. Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–1833) is said to have initiated a “revolution” in the study of geology. Be sides literally inventing the word scientist, Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences (1837) and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840) became the standard history of science texts for decades. The influence of these three cannot be overstated. According to Herschel, for instance, history demonstrated that observation, experimentation, and theory building were the leading causes of the sudden growth of natural science in the time of Bacon and Galileo. The “bigots” of previ ous generations, he wrote, became obstacles to progress; what they did not realize was that the “testimony of natural reason . . . places the existence and principal attributes of a Deity on such grounds as to render doubt impossible.” Indeed, added Herschel, scientific progress was eclipsed for “nearly eighteen centuries, till Galileo in Italy, and Bacon in England, at once, dispelled the darkness.” (1743–1805)Paley

11 William

Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell

Whewell shared Herschel’s and Lyell’s concerns regarding the intrusion of religious doctrine into the affairs and practice of science. He found in the Galil eo affair a stinging example of such an error and pointed out the long-standing negative repercussions for the church that resulted from it and warned against the dual errors of seeking “a geological narrative in theological records.” More over, on Whewell’s account, the advance of science suffered from “stationary” periods. What was the cause of these periods of stagnation? His explanation was that they failed to cultivate clear “fundamental scientific ideas,” and this in turn was linked with the authority of the church. The thinkers of previous generations were possessed by a spirit of “mysticism,” which pursued either particulars or wild generalizations. Thus “their physical science became Magic, their Astrono my became Astrology, the study of the Composition of bodies became Alchemy.”

30 September/October 2022

While Herschel found “abstract reasoning” an obstacle to scienti fi c prog ress, Lyell located it in the human tendency to revere tradition. Here, too, a progressive historical narrative played a crucial role. Throughout history, false assumptions and incomplete observations had gained cultural authority. For Lyell, organized religion was the chief transgressor. By elevating traditional beliefs to the level of the sacred and protecting them by means of social and state pressure, organized religion set enormous obstacles in the path to scienti fi c knowledge. Loyal to concepts, they often distorted the evidence for the sake of their abstract preferences. As a Unitarian theist, Lyell believed it was not religion that created conflict with science but rather “orthodoxy.” Indeed, he believed the very progress of human knowledge suggested continual movement away from orthodox Christian beliefs. Perhaps no single statement could sum up the “conflict thesis” as explic itly as the following: “A sketch of the progress of Geology,” Lyell asserted, “is the history of a constant and violent struggle between new opinions and ancient doctrines, sanctioned by the implicit faith of many generations, and supposed to rest on scriptural authority.” 12 Subsequent pages of his Principles of Geology were replete with examples of these sorts of “errors,” including the trial of Galileo, which he described as the “inquisitorial power which forced Galileo to abjure.” Lyell sought to tell a story in which the new science of geology, together with the human mind, was liberated from the superstitious, anthropomorphic, and theological prejudices of the past.

Whewell spoke of the “Indistinctness,” the “Dogmatism,” and the “Mysticism” of the Middle Ages, and even complained of the medieval belief of a flat earth. Here Whewell’s work bears testimony to the influence of “conflict,” demonstrat ing that he, too, was the recipient of a preexisting narrative trope regarding the engagement between natural philosophy and religion.13

In subsequent decades, a host of Victorian scientists, dissident intellectuals, radical Dissenters or Nonconformists, and even liberal Anglicans sustained in their language strong traces of a Protestant polemic against superstition, corrup tion, authority, and even apostasy from what they believed was the true message of Christ. Figures as diverse as George Combe (1788–1858), Robert Chambers

Converse

A Conflict between “Two Contending Powers”

Draper and White themselves must be placed within the wider religious changes occurring in the century. 14 While the majority of scholarly opinion has pitted Draper and White as antagonists rather than harmonizers, a closer reading of their respective works demonstrates a more nuanced position. As chair of chem istry at the University of New York, Draper reassured his students that there exists “an intelligent principle with all its affections and feelings, and acquisitions and knowledge unaltered and untouched” by the sciences. For him, studying na ture revealed the “peculiarity of the works of God.” At the same time, Draper cautioned that nature demonstrated “not a God of expedients, but a master of endless resources.” In a remarkable statement, he even claimed that to study na ture was to elevate the “mind of a philosopher to a perception of the laws upon what it pleases God to govern the universe.” 15

***

31MODERN REFORMATION (1802–1871), Francis W. Newman (1805–1897), James Martineau (1805–1900), William R. Greg (1809–1881), Thornton Leigh Hunt (1810–1873), George Henry Lewes (1817–1878), George Eliot (1819–1880), Arthur P. Stanley (1815–1881), Charles Kingsley (1819–1875), Charles Voysey (1828–1912), John Robert Seeley (1834–1895), William E. H. Lecky (1838–1903), and even the scientific naturalists Tyndall, Spencer, and Huxley distinguished theology from religion in the hope that the new discoveries in the natural and historical sciences would bring about a “New Reformation.”

Furthermore, in his History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, which was published nearly a decade before his History of the Conflict, Draper argued that Christianity had been “paganized” under Emperor Constantine. In his view, the intellectual history of Europe is largely a story of the corruption of Christianity. In fact, Draper believed that early Christianity was a gift of God, whereas eccle siastical organizations, or institutionalized religion, were the products of human invention. By the fourteenth century, he complained, “God had altogether disap peared” from organized religion. With the paganization of Christianity, however, came what Draper called the “tyranny of theology over thought.” He declared that those “who had known what religion was in the apostolic days, might look with boundless surprise on what was now ingrafted upon it, and was passing un der its name.” 16 Under closer inspection, even his notorious History of the Conflict continues to make such distinctions, as when Draper argues that he would con sider only the “orthodox” or “extremist” position and not the moderate ones. As so many others during the century, Draper’s narrative was organized loosely around an argument sanctioned by progressive narratives similar to Herschel, Lyell, Whewell, and the others. This is a drama of heroes and villains, friends and enemies—a gripping narrative presented as a moral lesson. Using images of conflict to generate public support for science, Draper represented history as the irreversible progress of Western civilization.

32 September/October 2022

For White, science was an aid to religion, encouraging its “steady evolution” into more purified forms. *** The Unintended Consequences of the “New Theology” But the liberal Protestant reformulation of religion was a risky strategy that ul timately backfired. A new generation of religious skeptics and unbelievers saw such liberal attempts at reformulating the idea of God and religion as gratu itous and unnecessary. Perhaps the most important secularist to have arrogated Draper and White, and liberal Protestant historiography in general, was Joseph McCabe (1867–1955). A Roman Catholic monk who abandoned his religious beliefs around 1895, McCabe wrote over two hundred books on science, history, and religion. A vehement advocate of atheism, McCabe frequently forecasted the doom of Christianity in light of modern science. In his massive and import ant Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists (1920), McCabe included both Draper and White in his tribute. McCabe also published an extremely popular pamphlet titled The Conflict between Science and Religion (1927), in which he essen tially repeated elements of the narratives of both Draper and White. But unlike them, McCabe gleefully cheered on the decay of religion all over the world. Fu ture historians, he argued, will look back with amusement at those men of sci ence and theologians of his own century who protested that there was no conflict between religion and science. “He will read the priests protesting,” he wrote, “that there is no conflict between true science and religion, and the professors plaintively chanting that there is no conflict between science and true religion.” But according to McCabe, the historians of the future will recognize that “science

For White, science was an aid to religion, encouraging its “steady evolution” into more purified forms. White also believed that Jesus had preached a “pure and un defiled religion,” and that the present conflict “was the fault of that short-sighted linking of theological dogmas to scriptural text which, in utter defiance of the words and works of the Blessed Founder of Christianity, narrow-minded, loudvoiced men are prone to substitute for religion.” 17 Later, in his 1919 Autobiography, White concluded that history had demonstrated that: while the simple religion of the Blessed Founder of Christianity has gone on through the ages producing the noblest growths of faith, hope, and charity, many of the beliefs insisted upon within the church as necessary to salvation were survivals of prime val superstition, or evolved in obedience to pagan environment or Jewish habits of thought or Greek metaphysics or medieval interpolations in our sacred books.18

White shared much of the same sentiments. By separating religion from the ology, White was able to denounce that the “most mistaken of all mistaken ideas” was the “conviction that religion and science are enemies.” While science has con quered “dogmatic theology,” he argued, it will “go hand in hand with Religion.”

Thus, in a remarkable twist of irony, both orthodox believers and radical unbelievers found themselves in concord. If theology was found unbelievable or unnecessary, then so must be religion. The narratives of liberal Protestant thinkers were, in short, appropriated by skeptics, who reshaped them to justify and promote their own specific vision of a progressive and secular society. Skep tics near the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century declared war not only on traditional religious believers but also on what McCabe caustically described as the “land of bunk,” those obfuscating religious modernists who attempted to accommodate theology to fit the modern age.

Many in the nineteenth century believed the “New Theology” would bring reconciliation between modern science and faith. “Conflict” occurred, many be lieved, not between scientific truth and religious truth, but between contesting theological traditions. The scientific naturalists Huxley, Tyndall, Spencer, and even Draper and White all made such a distinction between theology and reli gion. What enabled them to make these distinctions were the changes in reli gious thought that had occurred during the previous centuries. In short, Draper and White believed that theology was not only in conflict with science but also with religion. They envisaged the conflict as one between conservative and liberal theological traditions. This history, in other words, is one in which one theological tradition was pitted against another—a more progressive, liberal, and diffusive Christianity against a more traditional, conservative, and orthodox Christianity.

And upon deeper reflection, this conflict predated the nineteenth century. Such narratives of theological conflict appeared in Protestant historiography as early as the seventeenth century, among Anglo-American Protestants in partic ular. As far back as the sixteenth century, Protestant reformers had used a rhet oric of history, reason, and natural philosophy in their debates with the Catholic Church. But this history of polemic—one religious tradition claiming history, reason, and natural philosophy against another religious tradition—demonstrates that these rhetorical strategies had unintended consequences. By the eighteenth century, more liberal Protestants used the same polemic of history, reason, and science against their orthodox opponents. In time, then, such polemics were transformed from Protestant, anti-Catholic sentiments to an intra-Protestant self-critique, particularly between liberal and conservative Protestants.

Converse

33MODERN REFORMATION has, ever since its birth, been in conflict with religion.” Indeed, the vast majority of McCabe’s short book was a diatribe against progressive or “modernist reli gion.” Ironically, he repeated the same arguments of conservative and orthodox opponents of Draper and White, calling liberal Protestantism the “veriest piece of bunk that Modernism ever invented.” According to McCabe, those liberal theologians who reinterpreted traditional religious belief, wittingly or unwit tingly, attacked the very foundations of Christianity. The modernists, McCabe concluded, “are Christians who believe that Paul and the Christian Church have been wrong in nearly everything until science began to enlighten the world.” 19

Nourished in this religious context, by the mid-nineteenth century, narra tives of conflict between “science and religion” were largely deployed between

“In a twistremarkableofirony.. . the narratives of liberal society.”sivevisiontheirjustifyreshapedbyshort,thinkersProtestantwere,inappropriatedskeptics,whothemtoandpromoteownspecificofaprogresandsecular

4. Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805–1900 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001).

1. T. H. Huxley, Darwiniana (London: Macmillan and Co., 1894), 52, 58, 82, 149; Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1893), 5; and Method and Results (London: Macmillan and Co., 1894), 159.

2. See, e.g., Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

14. Here I summarize the material in my Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).

5. See, e.g., C. A. Patrides, ed., The Cambridge Platonists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); John Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

17. Andrew Dickson White, The Warfare of Science (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1876), 7–10; A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1896), 1.v–xii, 410.

15. Cited in Ungureanu, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition, 30. 16. John William Draper, A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1863), 198, 382–402.

13. William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences: From the Earliest to the Present Times, 3 vols. (London: John W. Parker, 1837), 1.215, 233.

8. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), esp. 221–26.

19. Joseph McCabe, The Conflict between Science and Religion, Little Blue Book No. 1211 (Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius,1927), 5–6, 7, 12, 24.

3. Linda Woodhead, ed., Reinventing Christianity: NineteenthCentury Context (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001).

6. See, e.g., Martin I. J. Griffin, Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England (Leiden: Brill, 1992); W. M. Spellman, The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 1660–1700 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993).

9. William Paley, Natural Theology; Or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (London: S. Hamilton, 1813).

7. See, e.g., John Dillenberger, Protestant Thought and Natural Science: A Historical Interpretation (London: Collins, 1961); Richard S. Westfall, Science and Religion in SeventeenthCentury England (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1970); R. Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1972); Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975); and Margaret Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1976).

18. Andrew Dickson White, Autobiography, 2 vols. (New York: Century, 1905), 2.533.

34 September/October 2022 contending theological schools of thought. It was not until the end of the nine teenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century that these narratives were appropriated by secularists, freethinkers, and atheists as weapons against all religion. Thus the notion that science and religion are inherently at war with each other did not emerge from secular society but from conflicting religious traditions. In short, the origins, development, and popularization of the “conflict thesis” in the nineteenth century was, in part, an unintended consequence of lib eral Protestant thought. Having a more accurate understanding of the “conflict thesis” as one that originated within contending religious traditions gives us a better understanding not only of how it developed, but also why it continues to persist despite decades of scholarship telling us it is false.

James C. Ungureanu (PhD, University of Queensland) is an intellectual historian and Upper School Humanities Teacher at Stony Brook School, Long Island, NY. He also serves as Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. He is the author of Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), and co-author with David Hutchings of Of Popes and Unicorns: Science, Christianity, and How the Conflict Thesis Fooled the World (Oxford University Press, 2022).

10. D. L. LeMahieu, The Mind of William Paley: A Philosopher and His Age (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976).

11. John F. W. Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1851 [1830]), 7-8, 72. 12. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, 4 vols. (London: John Murray, 1837 [1830–1833]), 1.44.

37MODERN REFORMATION Vol. 31, No. 5

things

III. Thinking

Persuade theologically about all

38 READING GENESIS IN THE Reformation by VINERWESLEY

The Literal Sense and Accommodated Language

39MODERN REFORMATION Persuade

OUGHLY HALF OF American Prot estants and a majority of self-identified evangelicals currently reject at least a portion (and in some cases, nearly all) of the modern scientific consensus about the age of the earth and the evolutionary development of life. There are myriad biblical and theological issues involved—not to mention broader social, cultural, and political dynamics—but for many skeptics, everything turns on the early chapters of

TheologicallyGenesis.orthodox

The andical,underfurtherspiritualaltwofoldScripturequadrigatraditionalheldthathasasense:literandspiritual.Thesensewasclassifiedtheallegortropological,anagogical.

Christians have long defended the inerrancy of the Bible, and for many modern Christians committed to biblical authority, an old earth and evolution appear incompatible with the “clear” teaching of the text. This idea is reinforced by the claims of a small but vocal cohort of apologists for young-earth creationism who insist that history is on their side. Theirs is the traditional position, they argue, and alternative approaches to the text are novel aberrations. John MacArthur once declared, “Until Darwinian evolution undertook a campaign to co-opt the story of creation and bring it into the realm of naturalistic ‘science’. . . no one who claimed to be a Christian was the least bit confused by the Genesis account.” 1 For many evangelicals (and some confessional Protestants as well), the pervasive notion that all faithful Christians have always read Genesis a particular way transforms this issue into a litmus test of faith itself. This historical sentiment, though, is simply mistaken. This is not how Christians have always read the Bible.

***

Ancient and medieval biblical commentators wrote extensively about the dif ferent senses, or meanings, of Scripture. The traditional four senses were the literal (or historical), allegorical (or spiritual), tropological (or moral), and ana gogical (or eschatological). Most commentators offered their own idiosyncratic variations on this standard quartet, expanding, contracting, rearranging, and recombining categories in various ways, but there was widespread agreement that each text contained multiple layers of meaning. The Reformation upended this status quo rather dramatically. Most Protestants—Lutherans and Reformed alike—championed the primacy of the literal sense and often disparaged the oth ers, with allegorical interpretation bearing the brunt of their wrath. Nevertheless, the Protestants did not eliminate alternative readings altogether. It would be difficult, after all, to read Daniel without considering its eschatological message, or Job without discussing its moral implications. In some cases, Protestants ac tually added new senses to the text. The Reformed emphasized the typological

“Thus allegory, ana gogy and tropology are not so much diverse senses as applications of one literal –Francissense.”Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 2.XIX.vi

Despite these nuances, the Protestant emphasis on the literal and historical sense of the Bible was very real and very persistent. When today’s evangelicals speak of reading the Bible literally, this is the lineage they stand within (knowing ly or not), but it is more difficult than they often assume to delineate the meaning of this literal sense. The Bible is filled with standard discursive phenomena— from symbols, metaphors, and analogies to hyperbole, sarcasm, synecdoche, polysemy, and more. It not always clear which texts ought to be read literally and which ought to be read figuratively. When Jesus says, “I am the vine; you are the branches,” he is clearly speaking metaphorically, but when he says, “This is my body,” what exactly does he mean? When Luther and Zwingli met in Marburg, their inability to agree on the precise meaning of those four words—hoc est corpus meum—turned the Reformation on its head.

40 September/October 2022

A different but related question concerns the truth-claims of such a text. How ought one to view the anthropomorphic and anthropopathic language the Bible uses to describe God? The Bible speaks of God’s eyes, ears, hands, and feet, even though he does not have a body. It speaks of God resting in Genesis 2 (when Isaiah claims God does not grow tired or weary) and repenting of his actions in Genesis 6 (when 1 Samuel and Numbers both claim God does not change his mind).

dimensions of many Old Testament texts, for example, and many Protestants read their own current events and national histories into the redemptive and eschatological narratives of the Bible.2

Long before the Reformation, ancient and medieval exegetes wrestled with similar questions, and one of the answers they offered was the doctrine of divine accommodation. God, they argued, accommodates his revelation to human fin itude. He deigns to speak and act in ways suitable to humanity’s epistemic and moral capacities. More colloquially, God uses common human language so that humans understand him, and precisely because God communicates through common human language, his communication bears the marks of ambiguity and finitude that characterize all human discourse. The message is constrained by the limits of the language and the listeners, and there are many ways it might be understood (or misunderstood). This idea appears in a host of ancient thinkers, including Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius, Augustine, and John Chrysostom, and it was embraced in the Middle Ages by Aquinas and many others. The details varied from one thinker to the next—some focused on the accommodation of divine language to humanity’s epistemic capacities, while others focused on the accommodation of divine commands to humanity’s moral weakness—but there was broad agreement that such language existed in the Scriptures to help humans comprehend the truth and actions of an incom prehensible God.3

The Protestants seized this doctrine and ran with it. Calvin, perhaps the chief proponent of accommodation among the early Reformers, wrote, “As nurses commonly do with infants, God is wont in a measure to ‘lisp’ in speaking to us. Thus such forms of speaking do not so much express clearly what God is like as

Accommodation and the Natural World

41MODERN REFORMATION Persuade accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity.” 4 Bullinger offered a similar explanation, insisting that the Bible “doth minister unto us some means, forms, and phrases of speech, by them to bring us to some such knowledge of God as may at leastwise suffice us while we live in this world.” 5

Appeals to divine accommodation were widespread, explaining various texts that would have been problematic if read literally, including references to God’s body, God repenting, God rejoicing, God learning new information, and even the comparison between God and a sleeping, drunk man in Psalm 78. Martin Bucer, Peter Martyr Vermigli, David Pareus, and many others made use of this idea. On the Catholic side of the aisle, Erasmus and Thomas Cajetan incorpo rated the doctrine of accommodation into their hermeneutics, and even Luther himself—with his dogged insistence on reading the text literally—appealed to this idea to explain Genesis 6.6 ***

This doctrine of accommodation also proved quite useful when readers confront ed passages about the natural world. Sixteenth-century Christians may not have possessed the knowledge and insights of twenty-first-century science, but they nevertheless faced the task of squaring their knowledge of nature—including insights gleaned from mathematics, astronomy, geology, geography, natural his tory, and medicine—with their reading of the Bible and their understanding of its authority.Theearly modern view of nature was shaped by Aristotle’s libri naturales, a collection of Aristotle’s works covering a wide variety of subjects, from physics and astronomy to anatomy and natural history. The discipline that provided an overarching framework for all other natural inquiry was known as natural phi losophy. Natural philosophy dealt with the foundational principles upon which other disciplines were built. It was concerned with motion, matter, and even the structure of the cosmos. When Aristotle’s natural philosophy first filtered into Western Europe from the Muslim world—where it had been translated into Arabic and passed down over the centuries—it was condemned by the church, most notably in 1210 and 1277, for its ostensible incompatibility with Christianity. By the end of the thir teenth century, however, western Europe had embraced Aristotelianism as gen erally amenable with the Christian faith. Nevertheless, there were certain un avoidable points of contention. Aristotle postulated an eternal world, while the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo taught of a created world with a definite beginning. Similarly, Aristotle proposed a mortal soul, and Christianity insisted on the soul’s immortality. On these two points, most Christians simply rejected Aristotle’s ideas, but on many ambiguous issues, Christians worked to join their faith and their Aristotelianism. Biblical statements about divine providence, for instance, had to be reconciled with Aristotle’s metaphysics. Similarly, and per

42 September/October 2022 haps humorously to modern readers, concerns about God’s freedom to move the universe—quite literally, to pick it up and move it somewhere else—colored debates about the existence of a vacuum, a significant point of contention in the Middle Ages. On every such issue, what Christians believed about the world—not only their natural philosophy but also their astronomy, geography, and geology— had to be reconciled with the biblical text, and they turned frequently to the idea of divine accommodation to do this. In Genesis 1:6, God creates the raqia (usually translated “expanse” or “firma ment”), separating the waters under it from the waters above it, and God calls this expanse “heaven.” Many ancient cosmologies involved a dome-like structure that stretched over the earth, and Aristotle’s cosmos included a similar idea. In the Ar istotelian system, the universe was a series of nested, solid spheres, like a cosmic matryoshka stacking doll, with the innermost terrestrial sphere containing the earth, each of the subsequent (and increasingly larger) spheres containing one of the planets, and the outermost sphere containing the fixed stars. Thus when late medieval or early modern Christians read this reference to the firmament, they would not have struggled to map it onto their own cosmology in one way or another. Problematically though, this verse suggested that there were waters beyond the firmament. For an Aristotelian, this was an impossibility, as their entire cosmic structure was premised on the idea that the heavens—which en compassed everything beyond the earth, including the planets and stars—were perfect and incorruptible. Water was imperfect and corruptible, so it could not exist in the heavens. Here is how Calvin dealt with this difficulty in his commen tary on Genesis: Moses declares the special use of the expanse, to separate the waters from the waters, from which words a great difficulty appears. For it is inconsistent with common sense and truly incredible that waters are above the heavens. For to me, it is a cer tain principle that only the visible form of the world is treated here. Whoever wishes to learn astronomy and other recondite arts must go elsewhere. Here the Spirit of God desires to teach everyone without exception; . . . it is undoubtedly the book of the unlearned.7 This was an appeal to divine accommodation. For Calvin, just as descriptions of God did not describe God in an exact and literal sense but rather accommodated that knowledge to our slight capacity, so also this biblical description of nature did not describe the world in an exact and literal sense but rather accommodated its depiction to human capacity. The text, he argued, was simply speaking in the common manner of the Israelites, describing how the world looked to ancient and unlearned eyes. It was not making any claim about the actual physical structure of the cosmos, and anyone wishing to explore that cosmos ought to look elsewhere. This is not unlike the sentiment Galileo famously expressed in his letter to the grand duchess of Tuscany, writing, “The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.”

43MODERN REFORMATION Persuade

Mosaic Natural Philosophy

This longstanding approach to the Bible and nature was upended in the closing decades of the sixteenth century. At the time, the hegemony of Aristotelianism was beginning to crumble under the sustained attacks of alternative Renaissance philosophies and various novel alternatives. Platonic, Stoic, Epicurean, Hermetic, And the sun stood still,and the ontookuntilstopped,moonthenationvengeancetheirenemies.

Calvin offered a similar explanation of “the two great lights” in Genesis 1:16. Early modern commentators viewed this passage as problematic, for it calls the sun and moon “the two great lights,” but astronomers had shown that the moon, despite its appearance, was smaller than many other planets in the sky. Calvin therefore concluded, Here, Moses does not precisely examine the secrets of nature as a philosopher. . . .

Moses wrote with popular language which, without instruction and literary knowl edge, all unlearned people will understand by their sense. But the astronomers in vestigate whatever the height of human intelligence is able to understand. . . . Let the astronomers possess their higher knowledge.8

Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? The sun stopped in the midst of heaven and did not hurry to set for about a whole day. (Josh. 10:13)

***

To be clear, few early modern Christians assumed the Bible was devoid of information about the natural world, and when its statements were in harmony with their respective natural philosophical systems, they did not hesitate to say so. Thus for every Copernican describing Joshua 10:13 as accommodated lan guage, there was an Aristotelian ready to wield the same passage against Galileo when his writings on heliocentrism ran afoul of the pope.

Throughout the early modern period, Reformed, Lutheran, and Catholic com mentators alike leveraged the doctrine of accommodation to deal with biblical passages about the natural world. Accommodation was a common recourse for many Protestants who embraced heliocentrism in the sixteenth century. The Aristotelian cosmos was geocentric, and numerous biblical passages seemed to support this idea. Psalm 104:5 says the earth cannot be moved, while Psalm 19:6 indicates the sun moves across the sky. Most notably, in Joshua 10:13, Joshua commands the sun to stand still over Gibeon. For early modern readers, read literally, these texts implied that the sun revolved around the earth. Many Chris tians, convinced instead that the earth revolved around the sun, explained these passages as little more than accommodated language.9

Some mixed their philosophy and theology more than others. Benedict Pereira engaged in extended natural philosophical discussions in the midst of his biblical commentary while others, like Calvin, generally avoided such issues. But even those deeply committed to the synthesis of theology and philosophy did not insist on reading every biblical passage about nature literally and rigid ly. They shared a certain flexibility when dealing with biblical claims about the natural world.

44 September/October 2022 and neo-Pythagorean texts flowing out of Spain and Italy offered countless radi cal alternatives to Aristotle’s cosmos. This was accompanied by increased appeals to empiricism, experimentation, and the “new science” that features in modern textbooks on the so-called Scientific Revolution. Our modern world today often looks back on this period rather triumphantly as the dawn of modern science, but at the time, it was sheer chaos. Copernicanism had undone the very structure of the Aristotelian universe, endless “new sciences” competed to take its place, and everything appeared to everyone to be in flux. In this midst of this philo sophical turbulence, many thinkers succumbed to skepticism. Others turned to syncretism, weaving various aspects of multiple philosophical traditions into one tangled amalgamation. But a small group, who often called themselves “Mosaic philosophers,” turned to the Bible.

Lambert Daneau’s Physica Christiana

This summary of Daneau’s opponents reads a great deal like Calvin’s comments on accommodation in Genesis 1, a commentary that Daneau had surely read.

Calvin wrote, “Moses does not precisely (subtiliter) examine the secrets of nature as a philosopher” and “Whoever wishes to learn astronomy and other recondite arts must go elsewhere.” Daneau reports that his opponents say, “Moses does not

The Mosaic philosophers proposed a novel approach to natural philosophy with the biblical text as its foundation. The fundamental principles of natural philosophy, they argued, must be found not in texts from ancient Greece or the creative minds of contemporary revolutionaries but rather in the one text that could not err. This was more than a shift from one textual authority to another. It was an iconoclastic epistemological claim—a turn to revelation over reason, observation, or experimentation as the source of natural knowledge—and a sig nificant expansion of the scopus of the Bible that challenged traditional biblical hermeneutics.Theurtext for this movement was Lambert Daneau’s Physica christiana . Daneau, a French Calvinist, argued that the fundamental principles of natural philosophy “are contained in the first chapter of Genesis.” 10 He set his position in contrast to those who turned to “the books of prophane philosophers” and insisted instead that natural philosophy must be drawn “chiefly out of holy Scrip tures.”11 In a conversation with his textual interlocutor, Daneau considers a par ticularly common objection to his approach: What is the other argument of those who think otherwise?

This evidently: those things which Moses wrote have been unfolded most simply and spoken generally, because it is fitted and accommodated entirely to our capacity and to a sense of human weakness, but not expressed and determined according to the true nature of things. Finally, that Moses does not explain things themselves and their natures exactly and precisely, nor are they examined. Therefore, they wish to extract and learn the true, definite, and accurate knowledge of this part of physics from elsewhere.12

Although Daneau was the most prominent, he was far from alone in this venture (nor was he the first). In the latter half of the sixteenth century, biblical natural philosophies were penned by Protestants and Catholics alike. Francis co Valles, Otto Casmann, Thomas Lydiat, Cort Aslakssøn, Johann Heinrich Alsted, John Amos Comenius, and many others produced Mosaic philosophies during these years. The Mosaic philosophers did incorporate traditional phil Lambert (1530–1595)Daneau

45MODERN REFORMATION Persuade explain things themselves and their natures exactly and precisely (subtiliter)” and “Therefore, they wish to extract and learn . . . this part of physics elsewhere.” The parallel is so striking that it stretches the boundaries of credulity to imagine that Daneau was thinking of anyone else. In his counterargument to this position, Daneau conceded that Moses used language “nude and simple, and as it were, stripped of all adornment and vestiture such that it would be easier to perceive.” But he continued, Although it is granted he spoke simply, he did not, however, say anything decep tively, falsely, or ignorantly. . . . It is one thing, then, to admit the style of Moses is nude and simple, a type of speech suitable for truth, but another to call it false and deceptive. . . . Therefore simply indeed, but truly; nude, but rightly; popularly, but honestly he teaches us these things about the world. . . . I confess Moses accommo dated himself to the capacity of our senses. However, I deny that which they claim, that he did not focus upon and attend to the truth of the matter.13 It followed, Daneau concluded, that the principal parts of the world and its causes and effects—the very substance of natural philosophy—could be found in the biblical text. This is the critical difference between Daneau and Calvin. For Cal vin, the accommodated language of Genesis 1 was simple and plain, depicting the world through the eyes of an ancient Israelite, who looked to the sky and imagined endless depths of water stretching across the heavens. But the text did not mean there were actually waters in the heavens. It made no truth-claim about the physical structure and composition of the cosmos. For Daneau, accommodated language may have been simple and plain, but it did reflect the physical structure and composition of the universe. It depict ed the world not through the eyes of an ignorant ancient Israelite but rather through the eyes of one accurately observing the world, relaying—albeit with unadorned language—the truth about its structure, composition, formation, and more. Thus Calvin comfortably dismissed the waters in the heavens and urged his readers to look elsewhere for such knowledge, while Daneau proceeded to explore in great detail the shape of the world, the characteristics of matter and elements, the depths of water and their formation, the physical effects of the Spirit mov ing across the waters, the process by which water and earth were separated, the composition and structure of the stars and the heavens, various general principles about motion and metaphysics, and even geography—all drawn from the text of Genesis. This was not only a different natural philosophy; it was also a different way to read the Bible.14

Not everyone embraced this new biblical approach, though. During this same time, new factions of empiricists and experimentalists rose to prominence. Many in such circles insisted on a separation between the “two books”—the book of Scripture and the book of nature—arguing that each was concerned with differ ent material. The two books were valid and authoritative within their own do

46 September/October 2022

osophical authorities into their work at points, often insisting that the general principles of natural philosophy must be drawn from Scripture but conceding that secondary details could be found in extrabiblical sources. Nevertheless, the Bible served as the primary and foundational source of natural knowledge for the Mosaic philosophers. Several contemporary groups, most notably the Paracelsians, also turned to the Bible as an authority on nature—only they read it metaphorically rather than literally. Some philosophers, like Benito Arias Montano, the editor of the Ant werp Polyglot Bible, constructed systems that existed somewhere in the liminal space between these groups. Montano’s approach fluctuated between traditional literal interpretation and a curiously esoteric philology that explored the hidden correspondences between the divine Hebrew language and the natural world. Despite their differences, these groups shared a common epistemological com mitment: namely, that the Bible was a rich source—and, for some, the source—of information about the natural world. This represented a departure from the pre vailing orthodoxy of prior centuries, and the Mosaic philosophers regularly and explicitly claimed as much, often listing their peers who had embraced a similar Mosaic methodology to express solidarity and delineate the boundaries of their renegade approach.15

Franciscus Rueus offered a biblical approach to minerology with his treatise on gems. Levinus Lemnius produced a biblical account of herbs and trees. Johann Georg Gross tackled not only philosophy but also medicine and law. This ap proach spread beyond the walls of Christianity as well. In Italy, Jewish naturalists and physicians like Abraham Portaleone turned to the Old Testament and the Jewish Talmud to construct a novel natural history that challenged the received wisdom of Hippocrates, Galen, and Pliny. These biblical approaches to other disciplines proved more resilient than the formal natural philosophy of Valles or Daneau. Long after attempts at formal Mosaic natural philosophy had ceased, the Bible remained deeply intertwined with natural history, medicine, geology, and more.16

Mosaic natural philosophy eventually faded from view in the seventeenth century. Most Mosaic authors struggled to extract a natural philosophical system from the pages of text that addresses the natural world only sporadically. Some, like Montano, managed to squeeze water out of rocks and construct something resembling a coherent natural philosophical foundation, but more broadly, the movement failed to produce a popular alternative to Aristotelianism. Neverthe less, the underlying epistemology and hermeneutics spread far beyond the realm of natural philosophy, and many writers applied similar Mosaic (or biblical) ap proaches in their respective fields.

47MODERN REFORMATION Persuade mains, but only by reasserting proper limits on the scopus of each would there be space for the authority of the other. One proponent of such a separation, Francis Bacon, famously railed against the mixture of science and religion, and as Ann Blair has noted, although he does not identify his target, it is not difficult to imag ine whom he had in mind. But the corruption of philosophy by superstition and an admixture of theology is far more widely spread, and does the greatest harm, whether to entire systems or to their parts. . . . Yet in this vanity some of the moderns have with extreme levity indulged so far as to attempt to found a system of natural philosophy on the first chapter of Genesis, on the book of Job, and other parts of the sacred writings; . . . from this unwholesome mixture of things human and divine there arises not only a fantastic philosophy but also a heretical religion.17 ***

If we return to where we began, with the common evangelical assumption that Christians have always read the Bible as they do today—namely, as an authorita tive source of literal information about the natural world—several helpful cor rectives might now be in order. All Christians have not always read the Bible in any one particular way. Humans are complex and unpredictable creatures. Large groups of individuals spread over vast reaches of time and space rarely, if ever, behave uniformly. Any claim that all Christians have always read a particular text a particular way is a reductionist historical absurdity that elides the many idiosyn cratic differences between two millennia of Bible readers. We might reasonably surmise, though, that many Christians committed to the authority of the Bible have approached questions about the literal meaning of the text with far more nuance and flexibility than some evangelicals dealing with Genesis today. Most Christians did read the creation narrative as a literal seven-day period, but the science of their day offered no reason to imagine an alternative. It is more relevant to ask how they responded when insights from astronomy, geography, or other disciplines challenged other interpretations of the Bible; and in many cases, they responded by adjusting their interpretations of the Bible. Their hermeneutics thus stand in clear opposition to those of modern evangelicalism. Anyone truly concerned with the historical views of the church ought to ask not merely “Did they believe in a seven-day creation?” but more holistically “How did they ap proach the text? And which factors did they take into account?”

Rethinking the Historical Narrative

Many in the science-skeptical evangelical crowd instinctively cringe at the notion that science ought to be used to inform and adjust one’s approach to the Bible, and almost all proceed with the assumption that any alternative reading must be justified primarily exegetically. Because exegetical evidence functions as the sine qua non for any reconsideration, all discussion about the creation nar rative devolves into the minutiae of Hebrew poetry, hendiadys and chiasms, and “We might rea sonably surmise, though, that many Christians commit ted to the authority of the Bible have approached ques tions about the literal meaning of the text with far more nuance and flexibility than some evangelicals dealing with Genesis today.”

16. See William Poole, The World Makers: Scientists of the Restoration and the Search for the Origins of the Earth (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010).

14. David Sytsma has argued that the differences between Calvin and Daneau are often overstated. For his account, see David Sytsma, “Calvin, Daneau, and ‘Physica Mosaica’: Neglected Continuities at the Origins of an Early Modern Tradition,” Church History and Religious Culture 95, no. 4 (2015): 457–76.

15. For more on the Mosaic philosophers, see Kathleen Crowther, “Sacred Philosophy, Secular Theology: The Mosaic Physics of Levinus Lemnius (1505–1568) and Francisco Valles (1524–1592),” in Nature and Scripture in the Abrahamic Religions: Up to 1700, vol. 2, ed. Jitse van der Meer and Scott Mandelbrote (Leiden: Brill, 2008); Ann Blair, “Mosaic Physics and the Search for a Pious Natural Philosophy in the Late Renaissance,” Isis 91, no. 1 (2000): 32–58; and Maria Portuondo, The Spanish Disquiet: The Biblical Natural Philosophy of Benito Arias Montano (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). For several contem porary lists of Mosaic philosophers, see Blair, “Mosaic Physics,” 37, 42, 50.

6. See Jon Balserak, Divinity Compromised: A Study of Divine Accommodation in the Thought of John Calvin (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), esp. 13–34, 114–16.

1. John MacArthur, “Forward,” in Coming to Grips with Genesis: Biblical Authority and the Age of the Earth, ed. Terry Mortenson and Thane Ury (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2008), 12.

7. John Calvin, In primum Mosis librum, qui Genesis vulgo dici tur, commentarios Iohannis Calvini (Genevae: Oliva Roberti Stephani, 1554), 1:6.

9. See Kenneth Howell, God’s Two Books: Copernican Cosmology and Biblical Interpretation in Early Modern Science (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002).

4. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 1.13.1. 5. Heinrich Bullinger, The Decades of Henry Bullinger: The Fourth Decade, ed. Thomas Harding, trans. H. I. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1851), 3.129–30.

48 September/October 2022 what counts as a “shrub” (Gen 2:5). This is not to say, of course, that textual considerations are unimportant. Nevertheless, for many historical Christians, evidence from the book of nature served as a valid impetus to rethink the book of Scripture, even in the absence of some exegetical smoking gun. What’s more, modern Christians today do this as well, whether they realize it or not. No one feels the need to offer a detailed exegetical justification for reading Joshua 10:13 as a figure of speech. Everyone reads it in a way consistent with the heliocentrism of modern science, and to read it any other way would make no sense.

8. Calvin, In primum Mosis librum, 1:16. It should be noted that Calvin did not always interpret such passages in Genesis con sistently. In a sermon covering Gen. 1:6, Calvin suggested that the “waters” above the firmament might be water vapors rising into the sky (as opposed to his dismissal of these “waters” as accommodated language in his commentary). But in this same sermon, Calvin appealed to the doctrine of accommodation to explain that Ps. 24, which speaks of God founding the earth upon the sea, did not imply that the land of the earth rested upon water, demonstrating once more his conviction that accommodated language need not cor respond with the physical structure of the world. See John Calvin, Sermons on Genesis: Chapters 1:1–11:4, trans. Rob Roy McGregor (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2009), 38–42.

3. For an overview of divine accommodation in Christian history, see Stephen Benin, The Footprints of God: Divine Accommodation in Jewish and Christian Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).

A variety of political and sociocultural currents that have converged at our present historical moment are steadily increasing the animosity and skepticism that many people feel toward the scientific community. Given the current trends, young-earth creationism appears unlikely to disappear anytime soon. A better understanding of the history of biblical interpretation will not resolve the issue, but it certainly would not hurt.

10. Lambert Daneau, Physice christiana, sive, Christiana de rerum creatorum origine et usu disputatio (Genevae: Apud Eustath. Vignon, 1580), 29. 11. Daneau, Physice christiana, 36. 12. Daneau, Physice christiana, 40. 13. Daneau, Physice christiana, 40–41.

2. See Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. ch. 5.

17. Francis Bacon, The New Organon, trans. Fulton Anderson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1960), 1.65. For Blair’s comments on this identification, see Blair, “Mosaic Physics,” 42.

Wesley Viner is a doctoral candidate in the history of science at Princeton University, where he is complet ing a dissertation on biblical interpretation and natural philosophy in the early modern period.

49MODERN REFORMATION Converse

50 September/October 2022 POEM

The Beginning Genesis 1:25 by Mark Green

In the beginning, long before it mattered, Raw potential knelt in reverent reverie, A lifeless void by brooding Spirit gathered— Colorless, unmade, unnamed, unseen, A vast expanse without a form suspended In time now births this Genesis presumed, And lovingly and tenderly attended As a child—infinity enwombed. So three persons working as one Artist With words alone paint emptiness away And creation, arrayed in royal garments, Befits a bride groomed for a wedding day. Earth breaks forth in life-intending glory, Birthed by the Word. And so begins our story.

51MODERN REFORMATION Persuade

53MODERN REFORMATION Vol. 31, No. 5 EngageIV. Understanding our time and place

What does he mean by “Reformed theol ogy”? He first notes that Reformed theology is orthodox Christianity. That is, it is not so much its own separate religion; at its core, it is consis tent with, indeed is an organic growth from, its catholic heritage. It ought to be thought of “as a

Gijsbert van den Brink, who holds the chair of theology and science in the Faculty of Religion and Theology at the Free University of Amsterdam, sets as the heart of his task resolving the following tension: “The Reformed highlighting of the cen tral role of the Bible . . . goes hand in hand with a preference for interpreting the Bible—including the Old Testament—as literally as possible, and thus raises the question of how evolutionary the ory can be brought in line with a ‘plain’ reading of the Scripture” (31; cf. 73). He says of himself, “I am inclined to accept the theory of evolution. I do not embrace evolutionary theory as if I were emotionally attached to it, but I accept it as the most plausible scientific theory to date to explain the earth’s bio diversity” (4). By “evolutionary theory,” van den Brink does not mean “evolutionism,” a wholly nat uralistic worldview. Rather, he claims that evolu tion refers to the “one specific mechanism” whereby biological adaptation and speciation occur; name ly, “natural selection based on the occurrence of phenotypic variation within in species” (35–36).

54 September/October 2022 Reformed Theology and Evolutionary Theory by Gijsbert van den Brink EERDMANS | 2020 | 328 PAGES (PAPERBACK) | $39.99 FOR THE PURPOSE OF introducing the current di alogue between specifically Reformed theology and evolutionary theory (1), this book serves ad mirably. As to its purpose of demonstrating that Reformed theology and evolutionary theory are compatible (5–6; cf. 266–67), this book will en courage some while others will remain unpersuad ed. Both groups should appreciate the book’s calm, careful, and candid engagement with the “tough questions” of science and faith. I wonder, howev er, whether in its attempts to allay doubts about compatibility, the book has opened the door to a deeper, more intuitive doubt. More of that below.

He notes that the first two levels hold a strong consensus among the scientific community (ex cepting those who, for reasons of their reading of their religious texts, take issue with them), but that the third level does not hold such a strong consensus in the scientific community. On this point, “Con temporary Darwinism is far from a monolithic uni ty” (60). He is also quick to note that this does not mean that evolutionary theory is itself in crisis, as not a few religious apologists have claimed. It does mean that the mechanism by which evolution takes place is seen as debatable. In any case, for the re mainder of the book, van den Brink asks readers to think “as if” these three levels of evolution were true and what this would mean for Reformed theology.

Book Reviews

Following Thomas B. Fowler and Daniel Kuebler, van den Brink distinguishes among “three levels of evolutionary theory.” The first level, “Gradualism,” refers to the gradual development over a long pe riod of time from simple things to more complex things (37–47). He notes that at this level “there is no implication . . . that the various species orig inated from one another” (36). The second level, “Common Descent,” refers to the “Comprehensive Family” that all life on earth comes from a single, common ancestor. The third level, “Universal Nat ural Selection,” refers to the famed “Darwinian Mechanism,” typically called “survival of the fittest” though it more accurately means the “survival of the most well-adapted organisms” (59).

Van den Brink thinks that the Reformed tra dition lends a flexibility to rethinking our inter pretation of, say, the early chapters of Genesis (cf. 97–98). But that flexibility has limits. For exam ple, he argues that there are several readings of the early chapters of Genesis compatible with a “plain” reading of the text and with a long history of ani mal speciation eventuating in homo sapiens. In these readings, Adam and Eve probably do not refer to the only two and very first two people of the homo sapiens species, but rather to a group or the heads of a group (van den Brink uses the phrase “Adam and Eve and their group”). But this is not to say that Adam and Eve were ahistorical. In other words, he maintains that though we have to adjust what are some typical ways of construing the details of the early chapters of Genesis, it is the essence of Reformed theology that Adam and Eve were his torical, that they were endowed with the image of God, that the Fall refers to “an originative event” in which humans willfully disobeyed the voice of God, and that this disobedience carried covenant al effects onward in the human race (183). The true historicity of these events is necessary to do jus tice to the Reformed understanding—indeed, the Christian understanding—of redemptive history (201–3). Hence, there is flexibility within limits. In summary, Reformed Christians are called to take evolutionary theory seriously because they take the book of nature seriously. This requires careful negotiation of Christian teaching and evo lutionary theory. Reformed theology is particu larly suited for this negotiation because of its dual emphases on the two books of God’s revelation and its continually reforming itself in the light of thatThinkingrevelation.back to the stated purpose of the book—helping “Christians who want to make up their minds on evolutionary theory as well as for evolutionists who want to make up their minds on Christianity” (1)—I wonder about the degree to which this has been accomplished. It seems to me that the general sense, articulated by C. S. Lewis in the early 1940s—that Christianity must “always be engaged in the hopeless task of trying to force the new knowledge into moulds which it has outgrown”—will still largely pervade among “evolutionists who wish to make up their minds about Christianity.” The compatibility of essential Christian claims with evolutionary theory will no doubt strike an interest among them, and it may even induce their assent. But giving the semper reformanda principle pride of place in Reformed theology will strike many as a clever attempt to maintain an escape hatch: any new deliverances of science may be claimed as compatible with Reformed theology because, after all, Reformed theology is always reforming.

55MODERN REFORMATION Engage specific stance—that is, an intensification of some theological doctrines, commitments, and even debates,” rather than as separatist or sectarian in its teachings (21). One of those “intesifications,” and the one he identitifies as the best candidate for a “leading motif” of Reformed theology, “is the famous adage, ecclesia reformata semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei— ‘a Reformed church should always be reforming according to the Word of God’” (22). Combine this with the likewise inten sified Reformed emphasis on God’s “two books” of revelation—nature and Scripture—and Re formed theology appears particularly well suited to take up questions related to evolution and the Christian faith (see 87–88).

Perhaps, though, van den Brink has an an swer to this. This careful negotiation is not a call to revise or reconsider all, or especially the core, of Christian theology. This book’s primary concern is, in fact, to show that this negotiation leaves the core Christian teaching as it is (274). Evolutionary theory helps us (forces us?) to examine the de tails of these teachings, to be sure. But it does not negate them or transform them beyond recogni tion. Instead, as van den Brink claims, we “end up with an enriched view of the workings of . . . God’s providence and revelation.”

Joshua Schendel is the executive editor of Modern Reformation.

EERDMANS | 2021 |

Perspectives

William Lane Craig, a prominent scholar of evangelical apologetics, published In Quest of the Historical Adam to open a new channel for her meneutical communication between evolution ary theory and a Christian doctrine of creation. Instead of a “traditional” (literal) reading of Gen esis, he suggests a scientifically “revisionist” one (xii). Within the scientific framework of evolu tionary theory, Craig creatively explores Adam’s existence through a mytho-historical approach to the creation accounts in Genesis to preserve hermeneutical integrity between a historicity of Adam and the theory of evolution. Yet, as Craig predicts, many evangelical Christians—including me—are perplexed by his one-sided apologetics based on paleontology. Craig considers the bib lical accounts of creation primarily in relation to scientific evidence supporting atheistic evolution theory. Arguably, the position he defends in this book stands in contrast to his career as a coura geous defender of evangelical truth. This is be cause the biblical interpretation of the historical Adam he offers through the lens of evolutionary theory is inconsistent with the biblical hermeneu tic he uses to defend the evangelical truth of God’s salvation through Christ. Above all, we have to pay attention to Craig’s hermeneutical censorship of God’s divine word through the lens of evolution theory. Although Craig seems to justify the plausibility of his prehistoric-anthropological understanding of Genesis, he seems to disregard the critical point that Adam and Eve were created perfectly by a “transcendent God” before the Fall. I am deep ly concerned with Craig’s biblical interpretation that must correspond to paleontological evidence supporting evolutionary theory. If Craig simply pursued a common grounding and hermeneuti cal continuity between the ancient sagas and the biblical accounts, then his “mytho-historical” ap proach would not be a problem. Considering that his book is written for people who struggle with reconciling evolution theory with their Christian faith, I would find this entirely acceptable. I am not criticizing his abandonment of any literal un derstanding of the creation accounts. The trouble for me is that Craig bases his entire interpretation of the biblical accounts on scientific evidence by radically minimizing the Bible’s divine content and purpose. It seems that as paleontologists find new evidence—hold on, give me time to shoehorn my biblical interpretation into it!

56 September/October 2022

By Hojin Ahn

With his hermeneutical premises in evolu tionary theory, Craig finally posits his main state ment about the quest for the historical Adam and Eve. He is sure of discovering the hidden scien tific fact of their existence in the mythological and figurative language in the passage about how God created the first human beings according to his own image (Gen. 1:26–27). Craig presumes that among numerous Neanderthals, God spe cially chose Adam and Eve on In Quest of the Historical Adam: A Biblical and Scientific Exploration by William Lane Craig 439 PAGES (HARDCOVER) $38.00 (Ahn cont’d on p. 58)

William Lane Craig’s Inconsistent Hermeneutic

57MODERN REFORMATION Engage

By Chad McIntosh

William Lane Craig’s In Quest of the Historical Adam is a stimulating and rewarding study intended for, we are told on the very first page, “persons who are Christian philosophers, theologians, and other ac ademics who are neither Old Testament scholars nor scientists” and for “intelligent laymen . . . for we are all laymen when it comes to areas outside our areas of specialization” (xi). So, despite my initial hesitancy to review this title given my lack of formal education in either biblical studies or a relevant science, perhaps I can lend insight as one from among the intended readership. Our topic is Adam and Eve, and we face two main questions: First, does the Bible present them as real, historical persons or mere literary figures used by biblical authors to illustrate theological truths? Second, if they are real, historical persons, then is belief in this original pair as the font of humanity in conflict with current science of hu man origins? William Lane Craig embarks on a quest to answer these and other questions, using the sharp tools of an analytic philosopher to hack through the thick jungles of diverse academic ter rains, including ancient mythology, Old and New Testament scholarship, paleoneurology, archae ology, and population genetics. In brief, here is what he found. We first encounter Adam and Eve, of course, in the primeval narratives of Genesis 1–11. Were the genre of Genesis straightforward historical narrative, the answer to the first question would be settled. But matters aren’t so easy; according to Craig, Genesis 1–11 exhibits nearly all the hallmarks of the genre of myth. But we must be careful here: as literary scholars use the term, a “myth” is not a popular idea or falsehood, but a traditional, sacred narrative believed by mem bers of a society that explains present realities by anchoring them in the prehistoric past. Yet at the same time, historical interest is not absent from the author of Genesis, as the genealogies show. Thus Craig thinks that Thorkild Jacobsen’s genre of “mytho-history”—a genre where real, historical events are narrated but with nonliteral literary devices used to communicate theolog ical truths—is therefore an apt classification of Genesis, popular aversions to the word myth notwithstanding. “Scholars simply need to be careful to explain our meaning to laymen” (157).

So, while the author of Genesis “intends for his narrative to be at some level historical, to con cern people who actually lived and events that really occurred, . . . those persons and events have been clothed in the garb of the metaphorical and figurative language of myth,” which makes it “fu tile to try to discern . . . what parts are historical and what parts are not” (201). We must therefore look elsewhere in the Bible for its stance on the historicity of Adam and Eve. Of the dozen (or so) relevant New Testament texts, Craig finds only a handful in Paul’s letters that plausibly assert a historical Adam. The rest, he argues, require the (McIntosh cont’d on p. 59)

EDITOR’S NOTE: In his most recent monograph, William Lane Craig takes up one of the most pressing issues in con temporary apologetics: the question of the origins of humanity and the historicity of the Genesis account of Adam and Eve. Because of Dr. Craig’s eminent reputation and the topic of this book, MR wished to provide two different perspectives on it, and so we invited both Dr. Hojin Ahn and Dr. Chad McIntosh to review Dr. Craig’s book.

A Bad Time for a Good Book

58 September/October 2022 and endowed them with human-intellectual ability and “rational souls” that are completely distinct from primates and animals (378). Here, Craig has the full assurance of his assumption that God’s sovereign election is compatible with natural selection by an extreme ly random process of evolution. At first glance, Craig’s argument is logically persuasive because of his synthesis of evolution ary biology and biblical revelation. It is, however, ironic that although Craig seems so assured that paleontological evidence matches up with the mythohistorical reading of the creation accounts, he never offers any scientific evidence for the existence of the historical Adam. Consequent ly, among mainstream scientific circles, Craig’s opinion is indeed considered to be quasi-scientific on the grounds that there are no statistical data or objective evidence that modern humanity bi ologically descends from single male and female progenitors like Adam and Eve. 1 Despite his apologetic intentions, Craig dangerously posits God’s creation within the evolutionary context, in which there is no need for the “transcendent” Creator’s existence. If God’s divine intervention miraculously occurred through evolution, then this would be an obvious violation of the law of the evolutionary creation process that God him self instituted or the unfair manipulation of the result of natural selection. By my estimation, Craig’s quest for the historical Adam amounts to a sort of Procrustean-bed-styled argument that arbitrarily squeezes God’s word into the evolu tionary paradigm and vice versa. More seriously, Craig’s synthetic perspective, which combines divine revelation with human reason, contradicts the theo-ontological logic in his evangelical apologetics. Craig has convinc ingly demonstrated the incarnation of God the Son, Christ’s penal substitutionary atonement, and physical resurrection by relying on a liter al reading of the New Testament.2 So why does Craig perform a U-turn into a mythological un derstanding of the creation accounts in Genesis? Craig criticizes John Dominic Crossan for denying the literal reading of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection, acknowledging only the mythologi cal and existential dimensions of the Christian no tions of resurrection; and Craig finds “theological double-talk” in Crossan’s historical quest for Je sus. 3 Yet here, if we apply the same hermeneutical principle to Craig’s mytho-historical approach to God’s creation, there seems also to be “theological double-talk.” Although Craig still argues for the existence of God the Creator and his miraculous work, he makes his biblical interpretation of cre ation narratives valid only within the framework of evolutionary theory based on paleontological evidence. Crossan states, “Well, after evolution we don’t read those six days literally anymore.” 4 It would not be unfair to argue that he and Craig seem to agree about the evolution-based biblical interpretation of Genesis. Crossan, at least, main tains his symbolic understanding of the Bible as a whole. By contrast, in Craig’s theology, a purely genetic-evolutionary idea of God’s creation and the biblical concept of Christ’s physical resurrec tion as God’s new creation are hermeneutically and ontologically exclusive to each other.

The now old question for positions like the one Craig takes in this book is still pressing: God’s saving grace in Christ—which Craig adamantly holds—seems to be ontologically unnecessary in a continuous, self-progressive process of evolution— which Craig also seems to hold based on current scientific theory. Without realizing the crack in his evangelical logic, he simply justifies the sole plau sibility of a mytho-historical reading of creation account narratives by highlighting the similarity between the Scripture and ancient myths. The her meneutical vulnerability is fundamentally attribut ed to Craig’s apologetics-oriented evangelical theology. He always employs external standards, such as philosophical reasoning and historical and scientific evidence, to prove and explain the divine events in the Bible. At this point, Karl Barth’s prophetic voice sounds like thunder from (Ahn cont’d on p. 60) Ahn (cont’d from p. 56)

I was also surprised by the scant attention given to Jesus’ com (McIntosh cont’d on p. 61) McIntosh (cont’d from p. 57)

59MODERN REFORMATION Engage pair to be no more than literary figures that illustrate theological truths. For instance, when Jesus refers to the mo nogamous union of Adam and Eve, he does so “to discern its implication for marriage and divorce, not asserting its historicity” (221). By contrast, Paul’s theology requires a historical Adam (and Eve), for Paul identifies Adam as responsible for a real-world event (the Fall) that led in time to oth er real-world effects, most importantly Christ’s atonement (see 1 Cor. 15:21–22, 45–46; Rom. 5:12–21). For Craig, this “suffices for the affir mation of a historical Adam” (242). Having completed the first leg of his quest, Craig sets out on the second—that is, to deter mine whether belief in an original pair as the font of humanity is in conflict with current science of human origins. The main objections to this, considered in the book’s penultimate chapter, turn out to be surprisingly weak so long as the primordial pair are located far enough in the distant past to account for the genetic and geo graphic diversity that we see in the human pop ulation around the world today. This is exactly what the evidence already surveyed in the third part of the book indicates: paleoneurological and archaeological evidence concerning when the first humans emerged places them within the Pleis tocene epoch, commonly known as the Ice Age, from 2.5 million to 12 thousand years ago. To es tablish this, of course, one must first determine what counts as “human.”

Here, Craig cautions against simplistically equating the natural kind of “human” with or ganisms scientifically classified as Homo. There is a wide variety of organisms within Homo that are plausibly not human, and others that are plausi bly human but not Homo sapien (e.g., Homo nean derthalis). To be human in the relevant sense is to exhibit sufficient anatomical and cognitive simi larity with modern humans. Cranial size is espe cially important, “given the correlation between brain size and cognitive capacity” (258). One of the more interesting (and dramatic!) aspects of Craig’s study is how multiple lines of evidence across several disciplines slowly converge, point ing to the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern Homo sapiens as the earliest species with the anatomical features and cognitive capacity to count as fully human. This was Homo heidelbergensis, whose image the book’s dust jacket bears. Craig therefore identifies Adam and Eve as mem bers of this group, having lived between 750,000 and 1,000,000 years ago. In the final chapter, Craig adds some reflections on how his findings square with the Christian view of the afterlife, the image of God, and mind-body dualism, for which the engaged reader will have been patiently waiting. Unfortunately, details are sparse here. In particular, what it means for man to be made in the image of God is left unclear, which is a surprising lacuna given the book’s topic. To be made in the image of God, Craig argues, is to “have certain faculties like rationality, self-con sciousness, freedom of the will, and so forth” — that is, to be “persons in the same way that God is personal and thus have the attributes of person hood. It is precisely the properties of personhood that are manifested by the cognitive behaviors to which we have appeals as evidence of humanity” (370). This can’t be quite right, since angels and demons are persons in this sense but are not hu man and not created in God’s image (or at least not explicitly stated in the Bible to be so). There must be something else about bearing God’s im age that makes one human. But what? It can’t be having a humanoid body, for man is not fashioned in the likeness of God’s body (God is spirit), and humans can exist unembodied (370–76). So, what is it about being made in God’s image that makes us human? “The stubborn fact is that Genesis leaves the image and likeness of God undefined” (367). That may be so, but can’t we as Christian philosophers say more? It’s odd that cranial size should do more work in picking out humans than the imago Dei!

3. “Craig on Crossan,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw9jvJp_nAo.

60 September/October 2022

4. James Halstead, “The Orthodox Unorthodoxy of John Dominic Crossan: An Interview,” Cross Currents vol. 45 (1995), 513.

5. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1963), 9. above: “If the aim of the ology is to understand the revelation attested in the Bible, theology as distinguished from all philosophical and historical science of religion will have to adhere to this method quite rigidly.”5

In conclusion, as an evangelical theologian, I have sincerely supported Craig’s apologetics movement toward reasonable faith. However, regarding the hermeneutical issue of Adam in Genesis, theological exegesis should not be con fined to or judged by any scientific or external understanding to safely verify the Christian faith of God’s creation. The intellectual tendency of ab solute reliance on science, apart from God him self, forebodingly debunks an unconsciously slow collapse of scientifically modernizing evangelical faith, just as the nineteenth-century Protestant liberals’ moralizing vision of genuine Christianity has sadly faded into the mists of history.

1. Stephen Schaffner, “Adam, Eve, and the Evolution of Humankind: In Quest of the Historical Adam: A Biblical and Scientific Exploration” by William Lane Craig,” Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), vol. 374 (2021): 162. A senior computational biologist, Stephen Schaffner says, “Biologists are likely to be highly skeptical of the idea that humanness is a binary condition that can be induced by a change in a single pair of ancestors— declaring the change to be miraculous and to incorporate an immaterial soul, as Craig proposes, will not make it more appealing.”

Dr. Hojin Ahn (PhD, University of St. Michael’s College) is the head minister of Korean Presbyterian Church of Nova Scotia (PCC) in Halifax, Canada. He is the author of A Construc tively Critical Conversation between Nonviolent and Substitutionary Perspectives on Atonement: Theological Motifs and Christological Implications (Pickwick, 2022). Ahn (cont’d from p. 58)

2. Regarding divine satisfaction of justice, Craig demonstrates a forensic logic of God’s punishment of the innocent Christ instead of fallen humanity. Craig, Atonement and the Death of Christ: An Exegetical, Historical, and Philosophical Exploration (Texas: Baylor University Press, 2020).

For my part, if I must select between an evolu tion-based symbolic understanding and a lit eral understanding of the biblical revelation of creation, I would rather be on the literal side. This is not because of the scientific credibility of creationism but because of the Creator God’s sovereignty that is beyond the demonstrated range of natural science. Yet Craig misconstrues that scientific immanence can grasp divine transcendence. Finitum non possit capere infini tum— “The finite cannot grasp the infinite”—is the hermeneutical premise that a genuine theo logian must take. More constructively, I would suggest that if one wishes critically to split creation accounts into the figurative and the historical, then that criticism cannot be only of the biblical accounts of creation from the standpoint of evolutionary theory. One also ought to take a critical stance on evolutionary theory from the biblical perspective of God’s revelation of the creation and Fall.

61MODERN REFORMATION Engage ments in Matthew 19:4–5, as Craig says in the introduction that it seems plausible, on the basis of this text, that Jesus believed in the historicity of Adam and Eve. Indeed, this seems to be the main concern; for if there is no historical Adam, then “even if Jesus were not guilty of teaching doctrinal error, he still would have held false beliefs concerning Adam and Eve, . . . which is incompatible with his omniscience” (7). Craig concludes that “as crazy as it sounds, denial of the historical Adam threatens to undo the deity of Christ and thus to destroy orthodox Christian faith” (8). Recall that it was the real-world effects of Adam’s sin that committed Paul to a historical Adam. But in Matthew 19:4–5, is not Jesus also appealing to the real-world effects of marriage, which itself is a real-world effect of God’s causal activities?

Finally, I can’t help but wonder about the book’s reception and impact. The chapters on the genre of Genesis are a tour de force, and they could be an invaluable contribution to popular debates about the meaning and interpretation of Genesis. But will they be? I have my doubts. De spite being described as a “popular-level book” (320), Craig’s quest may be too challenging for the average layperson. For example, Craig makes four distinctions crucial for discerning whether the Bible teaches that there is a historical Adam: (1) the literary vs. historical Adam, (2) truth sim pliciter vs. truth-in-a-story, (3) using a text illus tratively vs. assertorically, and (4) what a person citing a text believes vs. what they assert. These are indeed crucial distinctions for understanding the biblical claims with respect to Adam and Eve, but I’m afraid such subtlety would really try the patience of lay Christians, as frustrating as that may be to Christian academics. And it would be no less frustrating to lay Christians that respon sible positions must be handed down to them by scholars. So, are we to despair at the prospect of a responsible position ever becoming mainstream among

Finally,evangelicals?Craigjust does not appreciate how steep of a mountain the word myth will create for Evangelical Christians. It is in my estima tion insurmountable. That word and the book’s cover will almost certainly alienate a large and important audience who wrestle with reconciling their faith with the claims of (popular) scientif ic accounts of human origins. That said, as all Christians know, a precious gift can be refused for foolish reasons. Chad McIntosh (PhD, Cornell University) currently lives in central Ohio where he enjoys homesteading and writing when he can. McIntosh (cont’d from p. 59)

III.turn away and wander in the garden he Designed for me when he first brought me here. “Trust me, Ganny, watch and see what these young hands Will build for you, though now you can’t conceive That fruit will bloom, and all around this place Your friends will see what tender care brings forth When hands that love you love as well this land, You will see it grow as my love grows for you.”

Confused, like me, they try to summon hope For one we thought we knew so well until That day we searched and searched and then we saw Him pacing out some vision in the desert sand.

62 September/October 2022 POEM Noah’s Wife’s Lament

Genesis 6:13–18 by Mark Green “No,I. go away. Your words just suck the life From me and now our sons are scared of you

With all your fatal talk of rain and storm. Leave me to weep on all you’ll take from us.” I watch him go, his shoulders curved beneath A weight I can no longer bear. Where is That former comfort we all shared before His crazy dream about some future flood Eroded all our family’s faith. The boys, Now men, do want to trust and love the man Who taught them how to hunt and build and live A life of faith among our faithless friends.

I watched with disbelief but then it grew, Wild, at first, but in his gentle hands Delirious beauty blossomed unashamed To bear the fruit of my lover of the soil. My tears fall on the flowers of these vines, My love for him all tangled up, confused With questioning grief that he will take it all— This life, our home—and wash it clean away. OutIII. on the plains, I see his hardened frame Toiling in the furnace of his calling. It isn’t that he doesn’t love this garden, Or me. I presume, it’s what he has to do To see it through. Somewhere out beyond our sons Are wrestling with themselves and hordes of demons Whispering in their ears that there’s no future And yet still they love their father in his quest. Across the skyline of another sunset I view in rows what little wealth we have, Scant mounds of faith against our flood of doubts, Those ancient woods felled by his aging hands. I stand alone, hungry in this parched And dry garden, struggling with my husband’s plan. I’m still not sure his craft is good enough To create the space where we begin again.

63MODERN REFORMATION Engage

Let There Be Light by Joshua Schendel

64 September/October 2022Back Page

Augustine here pictures the books of God (nature and Scripture) as something like the original state of creation, profoundly deep and full of poten tial. Surrounding this deep is the darkness of the human mind, unable by its own powers to pene trate the depths. If these books are to fulfill their potential—that is, ordering all toward the enjoy ment of God’s rest—then God must speak, “Let there be light.” Augustine sees in these begin ning chapters of Genesis a metaphor useful for prayer: that God would sanctify his mind—that process whereby the human mind, clouded in fi nite ignorance and bent over in sin, is enlightened, straightened, and directed by God back to God. Nor is this a wayward or insignificant lesson to take from Genesis. Indeed, it is a lesson that the apostle Paul himself draws: “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). May we approach Scripture with eyes ready to seek and hands ready to knock. And may God grant us light to see into its depths.

Oh, let truth, the light of my heart, not my own darkness, speak unto me! I have descended into shadows and am darkened, but from this place, even from this place, my love was direct ed toward you. . . . Let me not be my own life; the life I have lived of myself has been death to me: in you I revive. Speak to me; converse with me. I have believed your books, and their words are very deep.

Joshua Schendel is the executive editor of Modern Reformation.

THE EARLY CHAPTERS OF GENESIS have al ways been of extraordinary interest to the people of God. Attempts to plumb the depths of the origin accounts became a particular pre occupation in the commentaries, homilies, and letters of the Patristics. Augustine, inheriting this tradition, famously attempted an explana tion of the Genesis creation account no less than five times. One of those attempts is recorded in the lat ter part of his Confessions (the part that few people read!), written at the very end of the fourth cen tury. In book XII, he begins his reflections on the early chapters of Genesis with these words: My heart, O Lord, affected by the words of Your Holy Scripture, is much busied in this poverty of my life; and therefore, for the most part, is the want of human intelligence copious in language, because inquiry speaks more than discovery, and because demanding is longer than obtaining, and the hand that knocks is more active than the hand that receives. He knew, as many had found before him and many more have found since, that mining the treasures of the Genesis account of creation re quires patient and persevering work on our part, and, most importantly, enlightening grace on the part of God. A little later in that book, in one of his cus tomary prayerful interjections, he picks that theme back up, yet in a striking way:

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God's Two Books

Articles inside

REFORMATION OUTTAKES | The Importance

BACK PAGE

FROM THE EDITOR

POEM | Talking Prayer with the Apostle Paul

POEM | The Beginning, Genesis 1:25

LETTERS

POEM | Noah’s Wife’s Lament, Genesis 6:13–18